ALARMS AND
DISCURSIONS

by G.K. Chesterton

copyright, 1911, by DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
Published February, 1911

PREFACE

I COULD wish that this string of loose papers, if it was to bear some such
name, had been called after the conventional version of the Elizabethan
stage-direction, and named “Alarums and Excursions.” If I were constrained to
put my moral philosophy in one sentence, I could not do it more satisfactorily
(to myself) than by saying that I am in favour of alarums and against alarms. It
is vain to tell me that these two words were the same once and come from a
common derivation. The people who trust to derivations are always wrong: for
they ignore the life and adventures of a word, and all that it has done since
it was born. People of that sort would say that every man who lives in a villa
is a villain. They would say that being chivalrous is the same as being horsey.

The explanation is very simple; it is that in the modern world authors do not
make up their own titles. In numberless cases they leave the title to the
publisher, as they leave the binding — that far more serious problem. I had
purposed to call this book “Gargoyles”; traces of such an intention can still
be detected (I fear) in the second essay. Some time ago I tried to write an
unobtrusive sociological essay called “What Is Wrong.” Somehow or other it
turned into a tremendous philippic called “What’s Wrong with the World,” with a
photograph of myself outside; a photograph I swear I had never seen before and
am far from anxious to see again. Such things arise from the dullness and
languor of authors, as compared with the hope and romantic ardour of
publishers. In this case the publisher provided the title: and if he had
provided the book too I dare say it would have been much more entertaining.

IN the frosty grey of winter twilight there comes a crackle and spurt of bluish
fire; it is waved for an instant in a sort of weak excitement, and then fizzles
out into darkness: and by the blue flash I can just see some little boys
lurching by with a limp bolster and a loose flapping mask. They attempt to
light another firework, but it emits only a kind of crackle; and then they fade
away in the dark; while all around the frosted trees stand up indifferent and
like candelabras of iron. It is the last Guy; perhaps the last in all England;
for the custom has been dwindling to nothing in all parts of the country. It
is as sad as the last oracle. For with it passes the great positive Protestant
faith which was for three centuries a real religion of the English. The burning
of that image has been as central and popular as the jubilee procession, as
serious as the Funeral of the King. Guido of Vaux has taken three hundred years
to burn to ashes; for much of the time the flare of him lit up the whole vault of
heaven, and good men as well as bad, saints as well as statesmen, warmed their
hands at that gigantic fire. But now the last gleam of red dies in the grey
ashes: and leaves English men in that ancient twilight of agnosticism, which
is so natural to men — and so depressing to them. The echo of the last oracle
still lingers in my ears. For though I am neither a Protestant nor a Pagan, I
cannot see without sadness the flame of vesta extinguished, nor the fires of
the Fifth of November: I cannot but be touched a little to see Paganism merely
a cold altar and Protestantism only a damp squib.

The old Protestant English who sustained this strange festival for three
centuries, were at least so far Christian that they tended to be Frivolous.
They were still sufficiently at one with the old religious life of Europe to
exhibit one of its most notable peculiarities; the slow extraction of
pleasurable associations from terrible or even painful dates and names. Nothing
so stamps the soul of Christendom as the strange subconscious gaiety which can
make farces out of tragedies, which can turn instruments of torture into toys.
So in the Catholic dramas the Devil was always the comic character; so in the
great Protestant drama of Punch and Judy, the gallows and the coffin are the
last and best of the jokes. So it is also with even the nobler solemnities. St.
Valentine was a priest and denied himself the love of women; but his feast has
been turned into a day for love-making. In certain indifferent lands and epochs
this has doubtless gone too far; there are too many people who connect Good
Friday only with hot cross buns; there are many who at Michaelmas think only of
the wings of a goose, and never of the wings of an Archangel. But broadly speaking,
this tendency is a real tribute to the healthful and invigorating quality in
the Christian faith. For if the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel, even
the terrors of the good can grow kindly. And there is certainly no stronger
instance of the thing than this quaint English survival; which has interpreted
the most hideous of deaths in terms of a hilarious half-holiday; and has
changed the fires of Smithfield into fireworks.

Quaintly enough, among the fireworks that light up this Protestant festival,
there are some that have almost papistical names; but they also bear witness to
the mystical levity which turns gibbets and faggots into playthings. When
little boys dance with delight at the radiant rotation of a Catherine wheel,
they seldom (I imagine) suppose themselves to be looking at the frightful
torments of a virgin martyr celebrated in Catholic art; yet this must surely be
the origin of the title. We might imagine a symbolic pageant of the faiths and
philosophies of mankind carried in this vivid art or science of coloured fires;
in such a procession Confucianism, I suppose, would be typified by Chinese
crackers; but surely there would be little doubt of the significance of Roman
candles. They are at least somewhat singular things to brandish when one is
renouncing the Pope and all his works; unless we do it on the principle of the
man who expressed his horror of cigars by burning them one at a time.

And, indeed, speaking of Confucianism, I have heard it said that the whole art
of fireworks came first from the land of Confucius. There is something not
inappropriate in such an origin. The art of coloured glass can truly be called
the most typically Christian of all arts or artifices. The art of coloured
lights is as essentially Confucian as the art of coloured windows is Christian.
Aesthetically, they produce somewhat the same impression on the fancy; the
impression of something glowing and magical; something at once mysterious and
transparent. But the difference between their substance and structure is the
whole difference between the great western faith and the great eastern
agnosticism. The Christian windows are solid and human, made of heavy lead, of
hearty and characteristic colours; but behind them is the light. The colours of
the fireworks are as festive and as varied; but behind them is the darkness.
They themselves are their only illumination; even as in that stern philosophy,
man is his own star. The rockets of ruby and sapphire fade away slowly upon
the dome of hollowness and darkness. But the kings and saints in the old
Gothic windows, dusky and opaque in this hour of midnight, still contain all
their power of full flamboyance, and await the rising of the sun.

ALONE at some distance from the wasting walls of a disused abbey I found half
sunken in the grass the grey and goggle-eyed visage of one of those graven
monsters that made the ornamental water-spouts in the cathedrals of the Middle
Ages. It lay there, scoured by ancient rains or striped by recent fungus, but still
looking like the head of some huge dragon slain by a primeval hero. And as I
looked at it, I thought of the meaning of the grotesque, and passed into some
symbolic reverie of the three great stages of art.

* * * * *

I

Once upon a time there lived upon an island a merry and innocent people, mostly
shepherds and tillers of the earth. They were republicans, like all primitive
and simple souls; they talked over their affairs under a tree, and the nearest
approach they had to a personal ruler was a sort of priest or white witch who
said their prayers for them. They worshipped the sun, not idolatrously, but as
the golden crown of the god whom all such infants see almost as plainly as the
sun.

Now this priest was told by his people to build a great tower, pointing to the
sky in salutation of the Sun-god; and he pondered long and heavily before he
picked his materials. For he was resolved to use nothing that was not almost
as clear and exquisite as sunshine itself; he would use nothing that was not
washed as white as the rain can wash the heavens, nothing that did not sparkle
as spotlessly as that crown of God. He would have nothing grotesque or
obscure; he would not have even anything emphatic or even anything mysterious. He
would have all the arches as light as laughter and as candid as logic. He built
the temple in three concentric courts, which were cooler and more exquisite in
substance each than the other. For the outer wall was a hedge of white lilies,
ranked so thick that a green stalk was hardly to be seen; and the wall within that
was of crystal, which smashed the sun into a million stars. And the wall within
that, which was the tower itself, was a tower of pure water, forced up in an
everlasting fountain; and upon the very tip and crest of that foaming spire was
one big and blazing diamond, which the water tossed up eternally and caught
again as a child catches a ball.

“Now,” said the priest, “I have made a tower which is a little worthy of the
sun.”

II

But about this time the island was caught in a swarm of pirates; and the
shepherds had to turn themselves into rude warriors and seamen; and at first
they were utterly broken down in blood and shame; and the pirates might have
taken the jewel flung up for ever from their sacred fount. And then, after
years of horror and humiliation, they gained a little and began to conquer
because they did not mind defeat. And the pride of the pirates went sick
within them after a few unexpected foils; and at last the invasion rolled back into
the empty seas and the island was delivered. And for some reason after this
men began to talk quite differently about the temple and the sun. Some,
indeed, said, “You must not touch the temple; it is classical; it is perfect,
since it admits no imperfections.” But the others answered, “In that it differs
from the sun, that shines on the evil and the good and on mud and monsters
everywhere. The temple is of the noon; it is made of white marble clouds and
sapphire sky. But the sun is not always of the noon. The sun dies daily, every
night he is crucified in blood and fire.”

Now the priest had taught and fought through all the war, and his hair had
grown white, but his eyes had grown young. And he said, “I was wrong and they
are right. The sun, the symbol of our father, gives life to all those earthly
things that are full of ugliness and energy. All the exaggerations are right,
if they exaggerate the right thing. Let us point to heaven with tusks and
horns and fins and trunks and tails so long as they all point to heaven. The
ugly animals praise God as much as the beautiful. The frog’s eyes stand out of
his head because he is staring at heaven. The giraffe’s neck is long because he
is stretching towards heaven. The donkey has ears to hear — let him hear.”

And under the new inspiration they planned a gorgeous cathedral in the Gothic
manner, with all the animals of the earth crawling over it, and all the
possible ugly things making up one common beauty, because they all appealed to
the god. The columns of the temple were carved like the necks of giraffes; the
dome was like an ugly tortoise; and the highest pinnacle was a monkey standing
on his head with his tail pointing at the sun. And yet the whole was beautiful,
because it was lifted up in one living and religious gesture as a man lifts his
hands in prayer.

III

But this great plan was never properly completed. The people had brought up on
great wagons the heavy tortoise roof and the huge necks of stone, and all the
thousand and one oddities that made up that unity, the owls and the efts and
the crocodiles and the kangaroos, which hideous by themselves might have been
magnificent if reared in one definite proportion and dedicated to the sun. For
this was Gothic, this was romantic, this was Christian art; this was the whole
advance of Shakespeare upon Sophocles. And that symbol which was to crown it
all, the ape upside down, was really Christian; for man is the ape upside down.

But the rich, who had grown riotous in the long peace, obstructed the thing,
and in some squabble a stone struck the priest on the head and he lost his
memory. He saw piled in front of him frogs and elephants, monkeys and
giraffes, toadstools and sharks, all the ugly things of the universe which he
had collected to do honour to God. But he forgot why he had collected them. He
could not remember the design or the object. He piled them all wildly into one
heap fifty feet high; and when he had done it all the rich and influential went
into a passion of applause and cried, “This is real art! This is Realism! This
is things as they really are!”

* * * * *

That, I fancy, is the only true origin of Realism. Realism is simply
Romanticism that has lost its reason. This is so not merely in the sense of
insanity but of suicide. It has lost its reason; that is its reason for
existing. The old Greeks summoned godlike things to worship their god. The
medieval Christians summoned all things to worship theirs, dwarfs and pelicans,
monkeys and madmen. The modern realists summon all these million creatures to
worship their god; and then have no god for them to worship. Paganism was in
art a pure beauty; that was the dawn. Christianity was a beauty created by
controlling a million monsters of ugliness; and that in my belief was the
zenith and the noon. Modern art and science practically mean having the
million monsters and being unable to control them; and I will venture to call
that the disruption and the decay. The finest lengths of the Elgin marbles
consist of splendid horses going to the temple of a virgin. Christianity, with
its gargoyles and grotesques, really amounted to saying this: that a donkey
could go before all the horses of the world when it was really going to the
temple. Romance means a holy donkey going to the temple. Realism means a lost
donkey going nowhere.

The fragments of futile journalism or fleeting impression which are here
collected are very like the wrecks and riven blocks that were piled in a heap
round my imaginary priest of the sun. They are very like that grey and gaping
head of stone that I found overgrown with the grass. Yet I will venture to
make even of these trivial fragments the high boast that I am a medievalist and
not a modern. That is, I really have a notion of why I have collected all the
nonsensical things there are. I have not the patience nor perhaps the
constructive intelligence to state the connecting link between all these
chaotic papers. But it could be stated. This row of shapeless and ungainly
monsters which I now set before the reader does not consist of separate idols
cut out capriciously in lonely valleys or various islands. These monsters are
meant for the gargoyles of a definite cathedral. I have to carve the gargoyles,
because I can carve nothing else; I leave to others the angels and the arches
and the spires. But I am very sure of the style of the architecture, and of the
consecration of the church.

EVERY man, though he were born in the very belfry of Bow and spent his infancy
climbing among chimneys, has waiting for him somewhere a country house which he
has never seen; but which was built for him in the very shape of his soul. It
stands patiently waiting to be found, knee-deep in orchards of Kent or mirrored
in pools of Lincoln; and when the man sees it he remembers it, though he has
never seen it before. Even I have been forced to confess this at last, who am a
Cockney, if ever there was one, a Cockney not only on principle, but with
savage pride. I have always maintained, quite seriously, that the Lord is not
in the wind or thunder of the waste, but if anywhere in the still small voice
of Fleet Street. I sincerely maintain that Nature-worship is more morally
dangerous than the most vulgar man-worship of the cities; since it can easily
be perverted into the worship of an impersonal mystery, carelessness, or
cruelty. Thoreau would have been a jollier fellow if he had devoted himself to
a green-grocer instead of to greens. Swinburne would have been a better
moralist if he had worshipped a fishmonger instead of worshipping the sea. I
prefer the philosophy of bricks and mortar to the philosophy of turnips. To
call a man a turnip may be playful, but is seldom respectful. But when we wish
to pay emphatic honour to a man, to praise the firmness of his nature, the
squareness of his conduct, the strong humility with which he is interlocked
with his equals in silent mutual support, then we invoke the nobler Cockney
metaphor, and call him a brick.

But, despite all these theories, I have surrendered; I have struck my colours
at sight; at a mere glimpse through the opening of a hedge. I shall come down
to living in the country, like any common Socialist or Simple Lifer. I shall
end my days in a village, in the character of the Village Idiot, and be a
spectacle and a judgment to mankind. I have already learnt the rustic manner of
leaning upon a gate; and I was thus gymnastically occupied at the moment when
my eye caught the house that was made for me. It stood well back from the
road, and was built of a good yellow brick; it was narrow for its height, like
the tower of some Border robber; and over the front door was carved in large
letters, “1908.” That last burst of sincerity, that superb scorn of antiquarian
sentiment, overwhelmed me finally. I closed my eyes in a kind of ecstasy. My
friend (who was helping me to lean on the gate) asked me with some curiosity
what I was doing.

“Well,” he said, “I suppose they would think this county rather outside the
radius.”

“Oh, my friend,” I cried brokenly, “how beautiful London is! Why do they only
write poetry about the country? I could turn every lyric cry into Cockney.

“‘My heart leaps up when I behold
A sky-sign in the sky,’

“as I observed in a volume which is too little read, founded on the older
English poets. You never saw my ‘Golden Treasury Regilded; or, The Classics
Made Cockney’ — it contained some fine lines.

“‘O Wild West End, thou breath of London’s being,’

“or the reminiscence of Keats, beginning

“‘City of smuts and mellow fogfulness.’;

“I have written many such lines on the beauty of London; yet I never realised
that London was really beautiful till now. Do you ask me why? It is because I
have left it for ever.”

“If you will take my advice,” said my friend, “you will humbly endeavour not to
be a fool. What is the sense of this mad modern notion that every literary man
must live in the country, with the pigs and the donkeys and the squires?
Chaucer and Spenser and Milton and Dryden lived in London; Shakespeare and Dr.
Johnson came to London because they had had quite enough of the country. And as
for trumpery topical journalists like you, why, they would cut their throats in
the country. You have confessed it yourself in your own last words. You
hunger and thirst after the streets; you think London the finest place on the
planet. And if by some miracle a Bayswater omnibus could come down this green
country lane you would utter a yell of joy.”

Then a light burst upon my brain, and I turned upon him with terrible
sternness.

“Why, miserable aesthete,” I said in a voice of thunder, “that is the true
country spirit! That is how the real rustic feels. The real rustic does utter
a yell of joy at the sight of a Bayswater omnibus. The real rustic does think
London the finest place on the planet. In the few moments that I have stood by
this stile, I have grown rooted here like an ancient tree; I have been here for
ages. Petulant Suburban, I am the real rustic. I believe that the streets of
London are paved with gold; and I mean to see it before I die.”

The evening breeze freshened among the little tossing trees of that lane, and
the purple evening clouds piled up and darkened behind my Country Seat, the
house that belonged to me, making, by contrast, its yellow bricks gleam like
gold. At last my friend said: “To cut it short, then, you mean that you will
live in the country because you won’t like it. What on earth will you do here;
dig up the garden?”

“Dig!” I answered, in honourable scorn. “Dig! Do work at my Country Seat;
no, thank you. When I find a Country Seat, I sit in it. And for your other
objection, you are quite wrong. I do not dislike the country, but I like the
town more. Therefore the art of happiness certainly suggests that I should live
in the country and think about the town. Modern nature-worship is all upside
down. Trees and fields ought to be the ordinary things; terraces and temples
ought to be extraordinary. I am on the side of the man who lives in the
country and wants to go to London. I abominate and abjure the man who lives in
London and wants to go to the country; I do it with all the more heartiness
because I am that sort of man myself. We must learn to love London again, as
rustics love it. Therefore (I quote again from the great Cockney version of
The Golden Treasury) —

“‘Therefore, ye gas-pipes, ye asbestos stoves,
Forbode not any severing of
our loves.
I have relinquished but your earthly sight,
To hold you dear in
a more distant way.
I’ll love the ’buses lumbering through the wet,
Even
more than when I lightly tripped as they.
The grimy colour of the London clay
Is lovely yet,’

“because I have found the house where I was really born; the tall and quiet
house from which I can see London afar off, as the miracle of man that it is.”

A SUNSET of copper and gold had just broken down and gone to pieces in the
west, and grey colours were crawling over everything in earth and heaven; also
a wind was growing, a wind that laid a cold finger upon flesh and spirit. The
bushes at the back of my garden began to whisper like conspirators; and then to
wave like wild hands in signal. I was trying to read by the last light that
died on the lawn a long poem of the decadent period, a poem about the old gods of
Babylon and Egypt, about their blazing and obscene temples, their cruel and
colossal faces.

“Or didst thou love the God of Flies who plagued
the Hebrews and was
splashed
With wine unto the waist,
or Pasht who had green
beryls for her
eyes?”

I read this poem because I had to review it for the Daily News; still it was
genuine poetry of its kind. It really gave out an atmosphere, a fragrant and
suffocating smoke that seemed really to come from the Bondage of Egypt or the
Burden of Tyre. There is not much in common (thank God) between my garden with the
grey-green English sky-line beyond it, and these mad visions of painted
palaces, huge, headless idols and monstrous solitudes of red or golden sand.
Nevertheless (as I confessed to myself) I can fancy in such a stormy twilight
some such smell of death and fear. The ruined sunset really looks like one of
their ruined temples: a shattered heap of gold and green marble. A black
flapping thing detaches itself from one of the sombre trees and flutters to
another. I know not if it is owl or flittermouse; I could fancy it was a black
cherub, an infernal cherub of darkness, not with the wings of a bird and the
head of a baby, but with the head of a goblin and the wings of a bat. I think,
if there were light enough, I could sit here and write some very creditable
creepy tale, about how I went up the crooked road beyond the church and met
Something — say a dog, a dog with one eye. Then I should meet a horse,
perhaps, a horse without a rider, the horse also would have one eye. Then the
inhuman silence would be broken; I should meet a man (need I say, a one-eyed
man?) who would ask me the way to my own house. Or perhaps tell me that it was
burnt to the ground. I could tell a very cosy little tale along some such
lines. Or I might dream of climbing for ever the tall dark trees above me. They
are so tall that I feel as if I should find at their tops the nests of the
angels; but in this mood they would be dark and dreadful angels; angels of
death.

* * * * *

Only, you see, this mood is all bosh. I do not believe in it in the least.
That one-eyed universe, with its one-eyed men and beasts, was only created with
one universal wink. At the top of the tragic trees I should not find the Angel’s
Nest. I should only find the Mare’s Nest; the dreamy and divine nest is not
there. In the Mare’s Nest I shall discover that dim, enormous opalescent egg
from which is hatched the Nightmare. For there is nothing so delightful as a
nightmare — when you know it is a nightmare.

That is the essential. That is the stern condition laid upon all artists
touching this luxury of fear. The terror must be fundamentally frivolous.
Sanity may play with insanity; but insanity must not be allowed to play with
sanity. Let such poets as the one I was reading in the garden, by all means,
be free to imagine what outrageous deities and violent landscapes they like. By
all means let them wander freely amid their opium pinnacles and perspectives.
But these huge gods, these high cities, are toys; they must never for an
instant be allowed to be anything else. Man, a gigantic child, must play with
Babylon and Nineveh, with Isis and with Ashtaroth. By all means let him dream of
the Bondage of Egypt, so long as he is free from it. By all means let him take
up the Burden of Tyre, so long as he can take it lightly. But the old gods
must be his dolls, not his idols. His central sanctities, his true possessions,
should be Christian and simple. And just as a child would cherish most a
wooden horse or a sword that is a mere cross of wood, so man, the great child, must
cherish most the old plain things of poetry and piety; that horse of wood that
was the epic end of Ilium, or that cross of wood that redeemed and conquered the
world.

* * * * *

In one of Stevenson’s letters there is a characteristically humorous remark
about the appalling impression produced on him in childhood by the beasts with
many eyes in the Book of Revelations: “If that was heaven, what in the name of
Davy Jones was hell like?” Now in sober truth there is a magnificent idea in
these monsters of the Apocalypse. It is, I suppose, the idea that beings really
more beautiful or more universal than we are might appear to us frightful and
even confused. Especially they might seem to have senses at once more multiplex
and more staring; an idea very imaginatively seized in the multitude of eyes.
I like those monsters beneath the throne very much. But I like them beneath the
throne. It is when one of them goes wandering in deserts and finds a throne
for himself that evil faiths begin, and there is (literally) the devil to
pay — to pay in dancing girls or human sacrifice. As long as those misshapen elemental
powers are around the throne, remember that the thing that they worship is the
likeness of the appearance of a man.

That is, I fancy, the true doctrine on the subject of Tales of Terror and such
things, which unless a man of letters do well and truly believe, without doubt
he will end by blowing his brains out or by writing badly. Man, the central
pillar of the world must be upright and straight; around him all the trees and
beasts and elements and devils may crook and curl like smoke if they choose. All
really imaginative literature is only the contrast between the weird curves of
Nature and the straightness of the soul. Man may behold what ugliness he likes
if he is sure that he will not worship it; but there are some so weak that they
will worship a thing only because it is ugly. These must be chained to the
beautiful. It is not always wrong even to go, like Dante, to the brink of the
lowest promontory and look down at hell. It is when you look up at hell that a
serious miscalculation has probably been made.

* * * * *

Therefore I see no wrong in riding with the Nightmare to-night; she whinnies to
me from the rocking tree-tops and the roaring wind; I will catch her and ride
her through the awful air. Woods and weeds are alike tugging at the roots in
the rising tempest, as if all wished to fly with us over the moon, like that
wild amorous cow whose child was the Moon-Calf. We will rise to that mad infinite
where there is neither up nor down, the high topsy-turveydom of the heavens. I
will answer the call of chaos and old night. I will ride on the Nightmare; but
she shall not ride on me.

MY friend and I were walking in one of those wastes of pine-wood which make
inland seas of solitude in every part of Western Europe; which have the true
terror of a desert, since they are uniform, and so one may lose one’s way in
them. Stiff, straight, and similar, stood up all around us the pines of the
wood, like the pikes of a silent mutiny. There is a truth in talking of the
variety of Nature; but I think that Nature often shows her chief strangeness in
her sameness. There is a weird rhythm in this very repetition; it is as if the
earth were resolved to repeat a single shape until the shape shall turn
terrible.

Have you ever tried the experiment of saying some plain word, such as “dog,”
thirty times? By the thirtieth time it has become a word like “snark” or “pobble.”
It does not become tame, it becomes wild, by repetition. In the end a dog
walks about as startling and undecipherable as Leviathan or Croquemitaine.

It may be that this explains the repetitions in Nature, it may be for this
reason that there are so many million leaves and pebbles. Perhaps they are not
repeated so that they may grow familiar. Perhaps they are repeated only in the
hope that they may at last grow unfamiliar. Perhaps a man is not startled at
the first cat he sees, but jumps into the air with surprise at the
seventy-ninth cat. Perhaps he has to pass through thousands of pine trees
before he finds the one that is really a pine tree. However this may be, there
is something singularly thrilling, even something urgent and intolerant, about
the endless forest repetitions; there is the hint of something like madness in
that musical monotony of the pines.

I said something like this to my friend; and he answered with sardonic truth, “Ah,
you wait till we come to a telegraph post.”

* * * * *

My friend was right, as he occasionally is in our discussions, especially upon
points of fact. We had crossed the pine forest by one of its paths which
happened to follow the wires of the provincial telegraphy; and though the poles
occurred at long intervals they made a difference when they came. The instant
we came to the straight pole we could see that the pines were not really
straight. It was like a hundred straight lines drawn with schoolboy pencils all
brought to judgment suddenly by one straight line drawn with a ruler. All the
amateur lines seemed to reel to right and left. A moment before I could have
sworn they stood as straight as lances; now I could see them curve and waver
everywhere, like scimitars and yataghans. Compared with the telegraph post the
pines were crooked — and alive. That lonely vertical rod at once deformed and
enfranchised the forest. It tangled it all together and yet made it free, like
any grotesque undergrowth of oak or holly.

“Yes,” said my gloomy friend, answering my thoughts. “You don’t know what a
wicked shameful thing straightness is if you think these trees are straight.
You never will know till your precious intellectual civilisation builds a forty-mile
forest of telegraph poles.”

* * * * *

We had started walking from our temporary home later in the day than we
intended; and the long afternoon was already lengthening itself out into a
yellow evening when we came out of the forest on to the hills above a strange
town or village, of which the lights had already begun to glitter in the
darkening valley. The change had already happened which is the test and
definition of evening. I mean that while the sky seemed still as bright, the
earth was growing blacker against it, especially at the edges, the hills and
the pine-tops. This brought out yet more clearly the owlish secrecy of
pine-woods; and my friend cast a regretful glance at them as he came out under the
sky. Then he turned to the view in front; and, as it happened, one of the
telegraph posts stood up in front of him in the last sunlight. It was no longer
crossed and softened by the more delicate lines of pine wood; it stood up ugly,
arbitrary, and angular as any crude figure in geometry. My friend stopped,
pointing his stick at it, and all his anarchic philosophy rushed to his lips.

“Demon,” he said to me briefly, “behold your work. That palace of proud trees
behind us is what the world was before you civilised men, Christians or
democrats or the rest, came to make it dull with your dreary rules of morals
and equality. In the silent fight of that forest, tree fights speechless
against tree, branch against branch. And the upshot of that dumb battle is
inequality — and beauty. Now lift up your eyes and look at equality and
ugliness. See how regularly the white buttons are arranged on that black stick,
and defend your dogmas if you dare.”

“Is that telegraph post so much a symbol of democracy?” I asked. “I fancy that
while three men have made the telegraph to get dividends, about a thousand men
have preserved the forest to cut wood. But if the telegraph pole is hideous (as
I admit) it is not due to doctrine but rather to commercial anarchy. If any
one had a doctrine about a telegraph pole it might be carved in ivory and
decked with gold. Modern things are ugly, because modern men are careless, not
because they are careful.”

“No,” answered my friend with his eye on the end of a splendid and sprawling
sunset, “there is something intrinsically deadening about the very idea of a
doctrine. A straight line is always ugly. Beauty is always crooked. These
rigid posts at regular intervals are ugly because they are carrying across the
world the real message of democracy.”

“At this moment,” I answered, “they are probably carrying across the world the
message, ‘Buy Bulgarian Rails.’ They are probably the prompt communication
between some two of the wealthiest and wickedest of His children with whom God
has ever had patience. No; these telegraph poles are ugly and detestable, they
are inhuman and indecent. But their baseness lies in their privacy, not in
their publicity. That black stick with white buttons is not the creation of the
soul of a multitude. It is the mad creation of the souls of two millionaires.”

“At least you have to explain,” answered my friend gravely, “how it is that the
hard democratic doctrine and the hard telegraphic outline have appeared
together; you have ... But bless my soul, we must be getting home. I had no
idea it was so late. Let me see, I think this is our way through the wood.
Come, let us both curse the telegraph post for entirely different reasons and
get home before it is dark.”

We did not get home before it was dark. For one reason or another we had
underestimated the swiftness of twilight and the suddenness of night,
especially in the threading of thick woods. When my friend, after the first
five minutes’ march, had fallen over a log, and I, ten minutes after, had stuck
nearly to the knees in mire, we began to have some suspicion of our direction. At
last my friend said, in a low, husky voice:

“I’m afraid we’re on the wrong path. It’s pitch dark.”

“I thought we went the right way,” I said, tentatively.

“Well,” he said; and then, after a long pause, “I can’t see any telegraph
poles. I’ve been looking for them.”

“So have I,” I said. “They’re so straight.”

We groped away for about two hours of darkness in the thick of the fringe of
trees which seemed to dance round us in derision. Here and there, however, it
was possible to trace the outline of something just too erect and rigid to be a
pine tree. By these we finally felt our way home, arriving in a cold green twilight
before dawn.

IN a small grey town of stone in one of the great Yorkshire dales, which is
full of history, I entered a hall and saw an old puppet-play exactly as our
fathers saw it five hundred years ago. It was admirably translated from the old
German, and was the original tale of Faust. The dolls were at once comic and
convincing; but if you cannot at once laugh at a thing and believe in it, you
have no business in the Middle Ages. Or in the world, for that matter.

The puppet-play in question belongs, I believe, to the fifteenth century; and
indeed the whole legend of Dr. Faustus has the colour of that grotesque but
somewhat gloomy time. It is very unfortunate that we so often know a thing
that is past only by its tail end. We remember yesterday only by its sunsets.
There are many instances. One is Napoleon. We always think of him as a fat old
despot, ruling Europe with a ruthless military machine. But that, as Lord
Rosebery would say, was only “The Last Phase”; or at least the last but one. During
the strongest and most startling part of his career, the time that made him immortal,
Napoleon was a sort of boy, and not a bad sort of boy either, bullet-headed and
ambitious, but honestly in love with a woman, and honestly enthusiastic for a
cause, the cause of French justice and equality.

Another instance is the Middle Ages, which we also remember only by the odour
of their ultimate decay. We think of the life of the Middle Ages as a dance of
death, full of devils and deadly sins, lepers and burning heretics. But this
was not the life of the Middle Ages, but the death of the Middle Ages. It is
the spirit of Louis XI and Richard III, not of Louis IX and Edward I.

This grim but not unwholesome fable of Dr. Faustus, with its rebuke to the mere
arrogance of learning, is sound and stringent enough; but it is not a fair
sample of the mediaeval soul at its happiest and sanest. The heart of the true
Middle Ages might be found far better, for instance, in the noble tale of
Tannhäuser, in which the dead staff broke into leaf and flower to rebuke the
pontiff who had declared even one human being beyond the strength of sorrow and
pardon.

* * * * *

But there were in the play two great human ideas which the mediaeval mind never
lost its grip on, through the heaviest nightmares of its dissolution. They
were the two great jokes of mediaevalism, as they are the two eternal jokes of
mankind. Wherever those two jokes exist there is a little health and hope; wherever
they are absent, pride and insanity are present. The first is the idea that the
poor man ought to get the better of the rich man. The other is the idea that
the husband is afraid of the wife.

I have heard that there is a place under the knee which, when struck, should
produce a sort of jump; and that if you do not jump, you are mad. I am sure
that there are some such places in the soul. When the human spirit does not
jump with joy at either of those two old jokes, the human spirit must be struck
with incurable paralysis. There is hope for people who have gone down into the
hells of greed and economic oppression (at least, I hope there is, for we are
such a people ourselves), but there is no hope for a people that does not exult
in the abstract idea of the peasant scoring off the prince. There is hope for
the idle and the adulterous, for the men that desert their wives and the men that
beat their wives. But there is no hope for men who do not boast that their wives
bully them.

* * * * *

The first idea, the idea about the man at the bottom coming out on top, is
expressed in this puppet-play in the person of Dr. Faustus’ servant, Caspar.
Sentimental old Tories, regretting the feudal times, sometimes complain that in
these days Jack is as good as his master. But most of the actual tales of the
feudal times turn on the idea that Jack is much better than his master, and
certainly it is so in the case of Caspar and Faust. The play ends with the
damnation of the learned and illustrious doctor, followed by a cheerful and animated
dance by Caspar, who has been made watchman of the city.

But there was a much keener stroke of mediaeval irony earlier in the play. The
learned doctor has been ransacking all the libraries of the earth to find a
certain rare formula, now almost unknown, by which he can control the infernal
deities. At last he procures the one precious volume, opens it at the proper
page, and leaves it on the table while he seeks some other part of his magic
equipment. The servant comes in, reads off the formula, and immediately
becomes an emperor of the elemental spirits. He gives them a horrible time. He
summons and dismisses them alternately with the rapidity of a piston-rod
working at high speed; he keeps them flying between the doctor’s house and
their own more unmentionable residences till they faint with rage and fatigue. There
is all the best of the Middle Ages in that; the idea of the great levellers,
luck and laughter; the idea of a sense of humour defying and dominating hell.

One of the best points in the play as performed in this Yorkshire town was that
the servant Caspar was made to talk Yorkshire, instead of the German rustic
dialect which he talked in the original. That also smacks of the good air of
that epoch. In those old pictures and poems they always made things living by
making them local. Thus, queerly enough, the one touch that was not in the old
mediaeval version was the most mediaeval touch of all.

* * * * *

That other ancient and Christian jest, that a wife is a holy terror, occurs in
the last scene, where the doctor (who wears a fur coat throughout, to make him
seem more offensively rich and refined) is attempting to escape from the
avenging demons, and meets his old servant in the street. The servant
obligingly points out a house with a blue door, and strongly recommends Dr.
Faustus to take refuge in it. “My old woman lives there,” he says, “and the devils
are more afraid of her than you are of them.” Faustus does not take this
advice, but goes on meditating and reflecting (which had been his mistake all
along) until the clock strikes twelve, and dreadful voices talk Latin in
heaven. So Faustus, in his fur coat, is carried away by little black imps; and
serve him right for being an Intellectual.

AT a little station, which I decline to specify, somewhere between Oxford and
Guildford, I missed a connection or miscalculated a route in such manner that I
was left stranded for rather more than an hour. I adore waiting at railway
stations, but this was not a very sumptuous specimen. There was nothing on the
platform except a chocolate automatic machine, which eagerly absorbed pennies
but produced no corresponding chocolate, and a small paper-stall with a few
remaining copies of a cheap imperial organ which we will call the Daily Wire.
It does not matter which imperial organ it was, as they all say the same thing.

Though I knew it quite well already, I read it with gravity as I strolled out
of the station and up the country road. It opened with the striking phrase
that the Radicals were setting class against class. It went on to remark that
nothing had contributed more to make our Empire happy and enviable, to create
that obvious list of glories which you can supply for yourself, the prosperity
of all classes in our great cities, our populous and growing villages, the
success of our rule in Ireland, etc., etc., than the sound Anglo-Saxon readiness
of all classes in the State “to work heartily hand-in-hand.” It was this alone,
the paper assured me, that had saved us from the horrors of the French
Revolution. “It is easy for the Radicals,” it went on very solemnly, “to make
jokes about the dukes. Very few of these revolutionary gentlemen have given to
the poor one half of the earnest thought, tireless unselfishness, and truly
Christian patience that are given to them by the great landlords of this
country. We are very sure that the English people, with their sturdy common
sense, will prefer to be in the hands of English gentlemen rather than in the
miry claws of Socialistic buccaneers.”

* * * * *

Just when I had reached this point I nearly ran into a man. Despite the
populousness and growth of our villages, he appeared to be the only man for
miles, but the road up which I had wandered turned and narrowed with equal
abruptness, and I nearly knocked him off the gate on which he was leaning. I
pulled up to apologise, and since he seemed ready for society, and even
pathetically pleased with it, I tossed the Daily Wire over a hedge and fell into
speech with him. He wore a wreck of respectable clothes, and his face had that
plebeian refinement which one sees in small tailors and watchmakers, in poor
men of sedentary trades. Behind him a twisted group of winter trees stood up as
gaunt and tattered as himself, but I do not think that the tragedy that he
symbolized was a mere fancy from the spectral wood. There was a fixed look in
his face which told that he was one of those who in keeping body and soul
together have difficulties not only with the body, but also with the soul.

He was a Cockney by birth, and retained the touching accent of those streets
from which I am an exile; but he had lived nearly all his life in this
countryside; and he began to tell me the affairs of it in that formless,
tail-foremost way in which the poor gossip about their great neighbours. Names
kept coming and going in the narrative like charms or spells, unaccompanied by
any biographical explanation. In particular the name of somebody called Sir
Joseph multiplied itself with the omnipresence of a deity. I took Sir Joseph to
be the principal landowner of the district; and as the confused picture
unfolded itself, I began to form a definite and by no means pleasing picture of
Sir Joseph. He was spoken of in a strange way, frigid and yet familiar, as a
child might speak of a stepmother or an unavoidable nurse; something intimate, but
by no means tender; something that was waiting for you by your own bed and
board; that told you to do this and forbade you to do that, with a caprice that
was cold and yet somehow personal. It did not appear that Sir Joseph was
popular, but he was “a household word.” He was not so much a public man as a
sort of private god or omnipotence. The particular man to whom I spoke said he
had “been in trouble,” and that Sir Joseph had been “pretty hard on him.”

And under that grey and silver cloudland, with a background of those frost-bitten
and wind-tortured trees, the little Londoner told me a tale which, true or
false, was as heartrending as Romeo and Juliet.

* * * * *

He had slowly built up in the village a small business as a photographer, and
he was engaged to a girl at one of the lodges, whom he loved with passion. “I’m
the sort that ’ad better marry,” he said; and for all his frail figure I knew
what he meant. But Sir Joseph, and especially Sir Joseph’s wife, did not want a
photographer in the village; it made the girls vain, or perhaps they disliked
this particular photographer. He worked and worked until he had just enough to
marry on honestly; and almost on the eve of his wedding the lease expired, and
Sir Joseph appeared in all his glory. He refused to renew the lease; and the
man went wildly elsewhere. But Sir Joseph was ubiquitous; and the whole of that
place was barred against him. In all that country he could not find a shed to
which to bring home his bride. The man appealed and explained; but he was
disliked as a demagogue, as well as a photographer. Then it was as if a black
cloud came across the winter sky; for I knew what was coming. I forget even in
what words he told of Nature maddened and set free. But I still see, as in a
photograph, the grey muscles of the winter trees standing out like tight ropes,
as if all Nature were on the rack.

“She ’ad to go away,” he said.

“Wouldn’t her parents,” I began, and hesitated on the word “forgive.”

“Oh, her people forgave her,” he said. “But Her Ladyship — ”

“Her Ladyship made the sun and moon and stars,” I said, impatiently. “So of
course she can come between a mother and the child of her body.”

“Well, it does seem a bit ’ard ...” he began with a break in his voice.

“But, good Lord, man,” I cried, “it isn’t a matter of hardness! It’s a matter
of impious and indecent wickedness. If your Sir Joseph knew the passions he
was playing with, he did you a wrong for which in many Christian countries he
would have a knife in him.”

The man continued to look across the frozen fields with a frown. He certainly
told his tale with real resentment, whether it was true or false, or only
exaggerated. He was certainly sullen and injured; but he did not seem to think
of any avenue of escape. At last he said:

“Well, it’s a bad world; let’s ’ope there’s a better one.”

“Amen,” I said. “But when I think of Sir Joseph, I understand how men have
hoped there was a worse one.”

Then we were silent for a long time and felt the cold of the day crawling up,
and at last I said, abruptly:

“The other day at a Budget meeting, I heard.”

He took his elbows off the stile and seemed to change from head to foot like a
man coming out of sleep with a yawn. He said in a totally new voice, louder but
much more careless, “Ah yes, sir, ... this ’ere Budget ... the Radicals are
doing a lot of ’arm.”

I listened intently, and he went on. He said with a sort of careful precision,
“Settin’ class against class; that’s what I call it. Why, what’s made our
Empire except the readiness of all classes to work ’eartily ’and-in-’and?”

He walked a little up and down the lane and stamped with the cold. Then he
said, “What I say is, what else kept us from the ’orrors of the French
Revolution?”

My memory is good, and I waited in tense eagerness for the phrase that came
next. “They may laugh at Dukes; I’d like to see them ’alf as kind and
Christian and patient as lots of the landlords are. Let me tell you, sir,” he
said, facing round at me with the final air of one launching a paradox. “The
English people ’ave some common sense, and they’d rather be in the ’ands of
gentlemen than in the claws of a lot of Socialist thieves.”

I had an indescribable sense that I ought to applaud, as if I were a public
meeting. The insane separation in the man’s soul between his experience and
his ready-made theory was but a type of what covers a quarter of England. As
he turned away, I saw the Daily Wire sticking out of his shabby pocket. He
bade me farewell in quite a blaze of catchwords, and went stumping up the
road. I saw his figure grow smaller and smaller in the great green landscape;
even as the Free Man has grown smaller and smaller in the English countryside.

I WAS walking the other day in a kitchen garden, which I find has somehow got
attached to my premises, and I was wondering why I liked it. After a prolonged
spiritual self-analysis I came to the conclusion that I like a kitchen garden
because it contains things to eat. I do not mean that a kitchen garden is ugly;
a kitchen garden is often very beautiful. The mixture of green and purple on some
monstrous cabbage is much subtler and grander than the mere freakish and
theatrical splashing of yellow and violet on a pansy. Few of the flowers merely
meant for ornament are so ethereal as a potato. A kitchen garden is as
beautiful as an orchard; but why is it that the word “orchard” sounds as
beautiful as the word “flower-garden,” and yet also sounds more satisfactory? I
suggest again my extraordinarily dark and delicate discovery: that it contains
things to eat.

The cabbage is a solid; it can be approached from all sides at once; it can be
realised by all senses at once. Compared with that the sunflower, which can
only be seen, is a mere pattern, a thing painted on a flat wall. Now, it is
this sense of the solidity of things that can only be uttered by the metaphor
of eating. To express the cubic content of a turnip, you must be all round it at
once. The only way to get all round a turnip at once is to eat the turnip. I
think any poetic mind that has loved solidity, the thickness of trees, the
squareness of stones, the firmness of clay, must have sometimes wished that
they were things to eat. If only brown peat tasted as good as it looks; if only
white firwood were digestible! We talk rightly of giving stones for bread: but
there are in the Geological Museum certain rich crimson marbles, certain split
stones of blue and green, that make me wish my teeth were stronger.

Somebody staring into the sky with the same ethereal appetite declared that the
moon was made of green cheese. I never could conscientiously accept the full
doctrine. I am Modernist in this matter. That the moon is made of cheese I
have believed from childhood; and in the course of every month a giant (of my
acquaintance) bites a big round piece out of it. This seems to me a doctrine
that is above reason, but not contrary to it. But that the cheese is green
seems to be in some degree actually contradicted by the senses and the reason;
first because if the moon were made of green cheese it would be inhabited; and
second because if it were made of green cheese it would be green. A blue moon
is said to be an unusual sight; but I cannot think that a green one is much
more common. In fact, I think I have seen the moon looking like every other
sort of cheese except a green cheese. I have seen it look exactly like a cream
cheese: a circle of warm white upon a warm faint violet sky above a cornfield
in Kent. I have seen it look very like a Dutch cheese, rising a dull red copper
disk amid masts and dark waters at Honfleur. I have seen it look like an
ordinary sensible Cheddar cheese in an ordinary sensible Prussian blue sky; and
I have once seen it so naked and ruinous-looking, so strangely lit up, that it
looked like a Gruyère cheese, that awful volcanic cheese that has horrible
holes in it, as if it had come in boiling unnatural milk from mysterious and unearthly
cattle. But I have never yet seen the lunar cheese green; and I incline to the
opinion that the moon is not old enough. The moon, like everything else, will
ripen by the end of the world; and in the last days we shall see it taking on
those volcanic sunset colours, and leaping with that enormous and fantastic
life.

But this is a parenthesis; and one perhaps slightly lacking in prosaic
actuality. Whatever may be the value of the above speculations, the phrase
about the moon and green cheese remains a good example of this imagery of
eating and drinking on a large scale. The same huge fancy is in the phrase “if
all the trees were bread and cheese,” which I have cited elsewhere in this
connection; and in that noble nightmare of a Scandinavian legend, in which Thor
drinks the deep sea nearly dry out of a horn. In an essay like the present
(first intended as a paper to be read before the Royal Society) one cannot be
too exact; and I will concede that my theory of the gradual virescence of our
satellite is to be regarded rather as an alternative theory than as a law
finally demonstrated and universally accepted by the scientific world. It is a
hypothesis that holds the field, as the scientists say of a theory when there
is no evidence for it so far.

But the reader need be under no apprehension that I have suddenly gone mad, and
shall start biting large pieces out of the trunks of trees; or seriously altering
(by large semicircular mouthfuls) the exquisite outline of the mountains. This
feeling for expressing a fresh solidity by the image of eating is really a very
old one. So far from being a paradox of perversity, it is one of the oldest commonplaces
of religion. If any one wandering about wants to have a good trick or test for
separating the wrong idealism from the right, I will give him one on the spot.
It is a mark of false religion that it is always trying to express concrete
facts as abstract; it calls sex affinity; it calls wine alcohol; it calls brute
starvation the economic problem. The test of true religion is that its energy drives
exactly the other way; it is always trying to make men feel truths as facts;
always trying to make abstract things as plain and solid as concrete things;
always trying to make men, not merely admit the truth, but see, smell, handle,
hear, and devour the truth. All great spiritual scriptures are full of the
invitation not to test, but to taste; not to examine, but to eat. Their
phrases are full of living water and heavenly bread, mysterious manna and
dreadful wine. Worldliness, and the polite society of the world, has despised this
instinct of eating; but religion has never despised it. When we look at a firm,
fat, white cliff of chalk at Dover, I do not suggest that we should desire to
eat it; that would be highly abnormal. But I really mean that we should think
it good to eat; good for some one else to eat. For, indeed, some one else is
eating it; the grass that grows upon its top is devouring it silently, but,
doubtless, with an uproarious appetite.

IT is a platitude, and none the less true for that, that we need to have an
ideal in our minds with which to test all realities. But it is equally true,
and less noted, that we need a reality with which to test ideals. Thus I have
selected Mrs. Buttons, a charwoman in Battersea, as the touchstone of all
modern theories about the mass of women. Her name is not Buttons; she is not
in the least a contemptible nor entirely a comic figure. She has a powerful
stoop and an ugly, attractive face, a little like that of Huxley — without the
whiskers, of course. The courage with which she supports the most brutal bad
luck has something quite creepy about it. Her irony is incessant and
inventive; her practical charity very large; and she is wholly unaware of the
philosophical use to which I put her.

But when I hear the modern generalisations about her sex on all sides I simply
substitute her name, and see how the thing sounds then. When on the one side
the mere sentimentalist says, “Let woman be content to be dainty and exquisite,
a protected piece of social art and domestic ornament,” then I merely repeat it
to myself in the “other form,” “Let Mrs. Buttons be content to be dainty and
exquisite, a protected piece of social art, etc.” It is extraordinary what a
difference the substitution seems to make. And on the other hand, when some of
the Suffragettes say in their pamphlets and speeches, “Woman, leaping to life
at the trumpet call of Ibsen and Shaw, drops her tawdry luxuries and demands to
grasp the sceptre of empire and the firebrand of speculative thought” — in
order to understand such a sentence I say it over again in the amended form: “Mrs.
Buttons, leaping to life at the trumpet call of Ibsen and Shaw, drops her
tawdry luxuries and demands to grasp the sceptre of empire and the firebrand of
speculative thought.” Somehow it sounds quite different. And yet when you say
Woman I suppose you mean the average woman; and if most women are as capable and
critical and morally sound as Mrs. Buttons, it is as much as we can expect, and
a great deal more than we deserve.

But this study is not about Mrs. Buttons; she would require many studies. I
will take a less impressive case of my principle, the principle of keeping in
the mind an actual personality when we are talking about types or tendencies or
generalised ideals. Take, for example, the question of the education of boys. Almost
every post brings me pamphlets expounding some advanced and suggestive scheme
of education; the pupils are to be taught separate; the sexes are to be taught
together; there should be no prizes; there should be no punishments; the master
should lift the boys to his level; the master should descend to their level; we
should encourage the heartiest comradeship among boys, and also the tenderest
spiritual intimacy with masters; toil must be pleasant and holidays must be
instructive; with all these things I am daily impressed and somewhat
bewildered.

But on the great Buttons’ principle I keep in my mind and apply to all these
ideals one still vivid fact; the face and character of a particular schoolboy
whom I once knew. I am not taking a mere individual oddity, as you will hear. He
was exceptional, and yet the reverse of eccentric; he was (in a quite sober and
strict sense of the words) exceptionally average. He was the incarnation and
the exaggeration of a certain spirit which is the common spirit of boys, but
which nowhere else became so obvious and outrageous. And because he was an
incarnation he was, in his way, a tragedy.

* * * * *

I will call him Simmons. He was a tall, healthy figure, strong, but a little
slouching, and there was in his walk something between a slight swagger and a
seaman’s roll; he commonly had his hands in his pockets. His hair was dark,
straight, and undistinguished; and his face, if one saw it after his figure,
was something of a surprise. For while the form might be called big and
braggart, the face might have been called weak, and was certainly worried. It
was a hesitating face, which seemed to blink doubtfully in the daylight. He had
even the look of one who has received a buffet that he cannot return. In all
occupations he was the average boy; just sufficiently good at sports, just
sufficiently bad at work to be universally satisfactory. But he was prominent
in nothing, for prominence was to him a thing like bodily pain. He could not
endure, without discomfort amounting to desperation, that any boy should be
noticed or sensationally separated from the long line of boys; for him, to be
distinguished was to be disgraced.

Those who interpret schoolboys as merely wooden and barbarous, unmoved by
anything but a savage seriousness about tuck or cricket, make the mistake of
forgetting how much of the schoolboy life is public and ceremonial, having
reference to an ideal; or, if you like, to an affectation. Boys, like dogs,
have a sort of romantic ritual which is not always their real selves. And this
romantic ritual is generally the ritual of not being romantic; the pretence of
being much more masculine and materialistic than they are. Boys in themselves
are very sentimental. The most sentimental thing in the world is to hide your
feelings; it is making too much of them. Stoicism is the direct product of
sentimentalism; and schoolboys are sentimental individually, but stoical
collectively.

For example, there were numbers of boys at my school besides myself who took a
private pleasure in poetry; but red-hot iron would not have induced most of us
to admit this to the masters, or to repeat poetry with the faintest inflection
of rhythm or intelligence. That would have been anti-social egoism; we called
it “showing off.” I myself remember running to school (an extraordinary thing
to do) with mere internal ecstasy in repeating lines of Walter Scott about the
taunts of Marmion or the boasts of Roderick Dhu, and then repeating the same
lines in class with the colourless decorum of a hurdy-gurdy. We all wished to be
invisible in our uniformity; a mere pattern of Eton collars and coats.

* * * * *

But Simmons went even further. He felt it as an insult to brotherly equality
if any task or knowledge out of the ordinary track was discovered even by
accident. If a boy had learnt German in infancy; or if a boy knew some terms
in music; or if a boy was forced to confess feebly that he had read “The Mill
on the Floss” — then Simmons was in a perspiration of discomfort. He felt no
personal anger, still less any petty jealousy, what he felt was an honourable
and generous shame. He hated it as a lady hates coarseness in a pantomime; it
made him want to hide himself. Just that feeling of impersonal ignominy which
most of us have when some one betrays indecent ignorance, Simmons had when some
one betrayed special knowledge. He writhed and went red in the face; he used to
put up the lid of his desk to hide his blushes for human dignity, and from behind
this barrier would whisper protests which had the hoarse emphasis of pain. “O,
shut up, I say. ... O, I say, shut up. ... O, shut it, can’t you?” Once
when a little boy admitted that he had heard of the Highland claymore, Simmons
literally hid his head inside his desk and dropped the lid upon it in
desperation; and when I was for a moment transferred from the bottom of the
form for knowing the name of Cardinal Newman, I thought he would have rushed
from the room.

His psychological eccentricity increased; if one can call that an eccentricity
which was a wild worship of the ordinary. At last he grew so sensitive that he
could not even bear any question answered correctly without grief. He felt
there was a touch of disloyalty, of unfraternal individualism, even about
knowing the right answer to a sum. If asked the date of the battle of
Hastings, he considered it due to social tact and general good feeling to
answer 1067. This chivalrous exaggeration led to bad feeling between him and
the school authority, which ended in a rupture unexpectedly violent in the case
of so good-humoured a creature. He fled from the school, and it was discovered
upon inquiry that he had fled from his home also.

I never expected to see him again; yet it is one of the two or three odd
coincidences of my life that I did see him. At some public sports or recreation
ground I saw a group of rather objectless youths, one of whom was wearing the
dashing uniform of a private in the Lancers. Inside that uniform was the tall
figure, shy face, and dark, stiff hair of Simmons. He had gone to the one place
where every one is dressed alike — a regiment. I know nothing more; perhaps he
was killed in Africa. But when England was full of flags and false triumphs,
when everybody was talking manly trash about the whelps of the lion and the
brave boys in red, I often heard a voice echoing in the under-caverns of my
memory, “Shut up ... O, shut up ... O, I say, shut it.”

MY forthcoming work in five volumes, “The Neglect of Cheese in European
Literature,” is a work of such unprecedented and laborious detail that it is
doubtful if I shall live to finish it. Some overflowings from such a fountain
of information may therefore be permitted to sprinkle these pages. I cannot
yet wholly explain the neglect to which I refer. Poets have been mysteriously silent
on the subject of cheese. Virgil, if I remember right, refers to it several
times, but with too much Roman restraint. He does not let himself go on
cheese. The only other poet I can think of just now who seems to have had some
sensibility on the point was the nameless author of the nursery rhyme which
says: “If all the trees were bread and cheese” — which is, indeed a rich and
gigantic vision of the higher gluttony. If all the trees were bread and cheese
there would be considerable deforestation in any part of England where I was
living. Wild and wide woodlands would reel and fade before me as rapidly as
they ran after Orpheus. Except Virgil and this anonymous rhymer, I can recall
no verse about cheese. Yet it has every quality which we require in exalted poetry.
It is a short, strong word; it rhymes to “breeze” and “seas” (an essential
point); that it is emphatic in sound is admitted even by the civilisation of
the modern cities. For their citizens, with no apparent intention except
emphasis, will often say, “Cheese it!” or even “Quite the cheese.” The
substance itself is imaginative. It is ancient — sometimes in the individual
case, always in the type and custom. It is simple, being directly derived from
milk, which is one of the ancestral drinks, not lightly to be corrupted with
soda-water. You know, I hope (though I myself have only just thought of it), that
the four rivers of Eden were milk, water, wine, and ale. Aerated waters only
appeared after the Fall.

But cheese has another quality, which is also the very soul of song. Once in
endeavouring to lecture in several places at once, I made an eccentric journey
across England, a journey of so irregular and even illogical shape that it
necessitated my having lunch on four successive days in four roadside inns in
four different counties. In each inn they had nothing but bread and cheese; nor
can I imagine why a man should want more than bread and cheese, if he can get
enough of it. In each inn the cheese was good; and in each inn it was
different. There was a noble Wensleydale cheese in Yorkshire, a Cheshire
cheese in Cheshire, and so on. Now, it is just here that true poetic
civilisation differs from that paltry and mechanical civilisation which holds
us all in bondage. Bad customs are universal and rigid, like modern militarism.
Good customs are universal and varied, like native chivalry and self-defence.
Both the good and bad civilisation cover us as with a canopy, and protect us
from all that is outside. But a good civilisation spreads over us freely like a
tree, varying and yielding because it is alive. A bad civilisation stands up
and sticks out above us like an umbrella — artificial, mathematical in shape;
not merely universal, but uniform. So it is with the contrast between the
substances that vary and the substances that are the same wherever they
penetrate. By a wise doom of heaven men were commanded to eat cheese, but not the
same cheese. Being really universal it varies from valley to valley. But if,
let us say, we compare cheese with soap (that vastly inferior substance), we
shall see that soap tends more and more to be merely Smith’s Soap or Brown’s
Soap, sent automatically all over the world. If the Red Indians have soap it
is Smith’s Soap. If the Grand Lama has soap it is Brown’s soap. There is
nothing subtly and strangely Buddhist, nothing tenderly Tibetan, about his
soap. I fancy the Grand Lama does not eat cheese (he is not worthy), but if he
does it is probably a local cheese, having some real relation to his life and
outlook. Safety matches, tinned foods, patent medicines are sent all over the
world; but they are not produced all over the world. Therefore there is in
them a mere dead identity, never that soft play of slight variation which
exists in things produced everywhere out of the soil, in the milk of the kine, or
the fruits of the orchard. You can get a whisky and soda at every outpost of
the Empire: that is why so many Empire-builders go mad. But you are not
tasting or touching any environment, as in the cider of Devonshire or the
grapes of the Rhine. You are not approaching Nature in one of her myriad tints
of mood, as in the holy act of eating cheese.

When I had done my pilgrimage in the four wayside public-houses I reached one
of the great northern cities, and there I proceeded, with great rapidity and
complete inconsistency, to a large and elaborate restaurant, where I knew I
could get many other things besides bread and cheese. I could get that also,
however; or at least I expected to get it; but I was sharply reminded that I had
entered Babylon, and left England behind. The waiter brought me cheese,
indeed, but cheese cut up into contemptibly small pieces; and it is the awful
fact that, instead of Christian bread, he brought me biscuits. Biscuits — to
one who had eaten the cheese of four great countrysides! Biscuits — to one who
had proved anew for himself the sanctity of the ancient wedding between cheese
and bread! I addressed the waiter in warm and moving terms. I asked him who he
was that he should put asunder those whom Humanity had joined. I asked him if
he did not feel, as an artist, that a solid but yielding substance like cheese
went naturally with a solid, yielding substance like bread; to eat it off
biscuits is like eating it off slates. I asked him if, when he said his
prayers, he was so supercilious as to pray for his daily biscuits. He gave me
generally to understand that he was only obeying a custom of Modern Society. I
have therefore resolved to raise my voice, not against the waiter, but against
Modern Society, for this huge and unparalleled modern wrong.

WHEN a man says that democracy is false because most people are stupid, there
are several courses which the philosopher may pursue. The most obvious is to
hit him smartly and with precision on the exact tip of the nose. But if you
have scruples (moral or physical) about this course, you may proceed to employ
Reason, which in this case has all the savage solidity of a blow with the fist.
It is stupid to say that “most people” are stupid. It is like saying “most
people are tall,” when it is obvious that “tall” can only mean taller than most
people. It is absurd to denounce the majority of mankind as below the average
of mankind.

Should the man have been hammered on the nose and brained with logic, and
should he still remain cold, a third course opens: lead him by the hand
(himself half-willing) towards some sunlit and yet secret meadow and ask him
who made the names of the common wild flowers. They were ordinary people, so
far as any one knows, who gave to one flower the name of the Star of Bethlehem
and to another and much commoner flower the tremendous title of the Eye of Day.
If you cling to the snobbish notion that common people are prosaic, ask any
common person for the local names of the flowers, names which vary not only
from county to county, but even from dale to dale.

* * * * *

But, curiously enough, the case is much stronger than this. It will be said
that this poetry is peculiar to the country populace, and that the dim democracies
of our modern towns at least have lost it. For some extraordinary reason they
have not lost it. Ordinary London slang is full of witty things said by nobody
in particular. True, the creed of our cruel cities is not so sane and just as
the creed of the old countryside; but the people are just as clever in giving names
to their sins in the city as in giving names to their joys in the wilderness.
One could not better sum up Christianity than by calling a small white
insignificant flower “The Star of Bethlehem.” But then, again, one could not
better sum up the philosophy deduced from Darwinism than in the one verbal
picture of “having your monkey up.”

Who first invented these violent felicities of language? Who first spoke of a
man “being off his head”? The obvious comment on a lunatic is that his head is
off him; yet the other phrase is far more fantastically exact. There is about
every madman a singular sensation that his body has walked off and left the
important part of him behind.

But the cases of this popular perfection in phrase are even stronger when they
are more vulgar. What concentrated irony and imagination there is for
instance, in the metaphor which describes a man doing a midnight flitting as “shooting
the moon”? It expresses everything about the run away: his eccentric
occupation, his improbable explanations, his furtive air as of a hunter, his
constant glances at the blank clock in the sky.

No; the English democracy is weak enough about a number of things; for
instance, it is weak in politics. But there is no doubt that democracy is
wonderfully strong in literature. Very few books that the cultured class has
produced of late have been such good literature as the expression “painting the
town red.”

* * * * *

Oddly enough, this last Cockney epigram clings to my memory. For as I was
walking a little while ago round a corner near Victoria I realised for the
first time that a familiar lamp-post was painted all over with a bright
vermilion just as if it were trying (in spite of the obvious bodily
disqualification) to pretend that it was a pillar-box. I have since heard official
explanations of these startling and scarlet objects. But my first fancy was
that some dissipated gentleman on his way home at four o’clock in the morning
had attempted to paint the town red and got only as far as one lamp-post.

I began to make a fairy tale about the man; and, indeed, this phrase contains
both a fairy tale and a philosophy; it really states almost the whole truth
about those pure outbreaks of pagan enjoyment to which all healthy men have
often been tempted. It expresses the desire to have levity on a large scale
which is the essence of such a mood. The rowdy young man is not content to
paint his tutor’s door green: he would like to paint the whole city scarlet.
The word which to us best recalls such gigantesque idiocy is the word “mafficking.”
The slaves of that saturnalia were not only painting the town red; they thought
that they were painting the map red — that they were painting the world red. But,
indeed, this Imperial debauch has in it something worse than the mere larkiness
which is my present topic; it has an element of real self-flattery and of sin.
The Jingo who wants to admire himself is worse than the blackguard who only wants
to enjoy himself. In a very old ninth-century illumination which I have seen,
depicting the war of the rebel angels in heaven, Satan is represented as
distributing to his followers peacock feathers — the symbols of an evil pride.
Satan also distributed peacock feathers to his followers on Mafeking Night.

* * * * *

But taking the case of ordinary pagan recklessness and pleasure seeking, it is,
as we have said, well expressed in this image. First, because it conveys this
notion of filling the world with one private folly; and secondly, because of
the profound idea involved in the choice of colour. Red is the most joyful and
dreadful thing in the physical universe; it is the fiercest note, it is the
highest light, it is the place where the walls of this world of ours wear
thinnest and something beyond burns through. It glows in the blood which
sustains and in the fire which destroys us, in the roses of our romance and in
the awful cup of our religion. It stands for all passionate happiness, as in
faith or in first love.

Now, the profligate is he who wishes to spread this crimson of conscious joy
over everything; to have excitement at every moment; to paint everything red.
He bursts a thousand barrels of wine to incarnadine the streets; and sometimes
(in his last madness) he will butcher beasts and men to dip his gigantic
brushes in their blood. For it marks the sacredness of red in nature, that it
is secret even when it is ubiquitous, like blood in the human body, which is
omnipresent, yet invisible. As long as blood lives it is hidden; it is only
dead blood that we see. But the earlier parts of the rake’s progress are very
natural and amusing. Painting the town red is a delightful thing until it is
done. It would be splendid to see the cross of St. Paul’s as red as the cross
of St. George, and the gallons of red paint running down the dome or dripping
from the Nelson Column. But when it is done, when you have painted the town
red, an extraordinary thing happens. You cannot see any red at all.

* * * * *

I can see, as in a sort of vision, the successful artist standing in the midst
of that frightful city, hung on all sides with the scarlet of his shame. And
then, when everything is red, he will long for a red rose in a green hedge and
long in vain; he will dream of a red leaf and be unable even to imagine it. He
has desecrated the divine colour, and he can no longer see it, though it is all
around. I see him, a single black figure against the red-hot hell that he has
kindled, where spires and turrets stand up like immobile flames: he is
stiffened in a sort of agony of prayer. Then the mercy of Heaven is loosened,
and I see one or two flakes of snow very slowly begin to fall.

AS I see the corn grow green all about my neighbourhood, there rushes on me for
no reason in particular a memory of the winter. I say “rushes,” for that is the
very word for the old sweeping lines of the ploughed fields. From some
accidental turn of a train-journey or a walking tour, I saw suddenly the fierce
rush of the furrows. The furrows are like arrows; they fly along an arc of sky.
They are like leaping animals; they vault an inviolable hill and roll down the
other side. They are like battering battalions; they rush over a hill with
flying squadrons and carry it with a cavalry charge. They have all the air of
Arabs sweeping a desert, of rockets sweeping the sky, of torrents sweeping a
watercourse. Nothing ever seemed so living as those brown lines as they shot
sheer from the height of a ridge down to their still whirl of the valley. They
were swifter than arrows, fiercer than Arabs, more riotous and rejoicing than
rockets. And yet they were only thin straight lines drawn with difficulty,
like a diagram, by painful and patient men. The men that ploughed tried to
plough straight; they had no notion of giving great sweeps and swirls to the
eye. Those cataracts of cloven earth; they were done by the grace of God. I
had always rejoiced in them; but I had never found any reason for my joy. There
are some very clever people who cannot enjoy the joy unless they understand
it. There are other and even cleverer people who say that they lose the joy
the moment they do understand it. Thank God I was never clever, and I could
always enjoy things when I understood them and when I didn’t. I can enjoy the
orthodox Tory, though I could never understand him. I can also enjoy the
orthodox Liberal, though I understand him only too well.

* * * * *

But the splendour of furrowed fields is this: that like all brave things they
are made straight, and therefore they bend. In everything that bows gracefully
there must be an effort at stiffness. Bows are beautiful when they bend only
because they try to remain rigid; and sword-blades can curl like silver ribbons
only because they are certain to spring straight again. But the same is true
of every tough curve of the tree-trunk, of every strong-backed bend of the
bough; there is hardly any such thing in Nature as a mere droop of weakness. Rigidity
yielding a little, like justice swayed by mercy, is the whole beauty of the
earth. The cosmos is a diagram just bent beautifully out of shape. Everything
tries to be straight; and everything just fortunately fails.

The foil may curve in the lunge, but there is nothing beautiful about beginning
the battle with a crooked foil. So the strict aim, the strong doctrine, may
give a little in the actual fight with facts: but that is no reason for
beginning with a weak doctrine or a twisted aim. Do not be an opportunist; try
to be theoretic at all the opportunities; fate can be trusted to do all the
opportunist part of it. Do not try to bend, any more than the trees try to
bend. Try to grow straight, and life will bend you.

Alas! I am giving the moral before the fable; and yet I hardly think that
otherwise you could see all that I mean in that enormous vision of the ploughed
hills. These great furrowed slopes are the oldest architecture of man: the
oldest astronomy was his guide, the oldest botany his object. And for geometry,
the mere word proves my case.

* * * * *

But when I looked at those torrents of ploughed parallels, that great rush of
rigid lines, I seemed to see the whole huge achievement of democracy. Here was
mere equality: but equality seen in bulk is more superb than any supremacy. Equality
free and flying, equality rushing over hill and dale, equality charging the
world — that was the meaning of those military furrows, military in their
identity, military in their energy. They sculptured hill and dale with strong
curves merely because they did not mean to curve at all. They made the strong
lines of landscape with their stiffly driven swords of the soil. It is not only
nonsense, but blasphemy, to say that man has spoilt the country. Man has
created the country; it was his business, as the image of God. No hill,
covered with common scrub or patches of purple heath, could have been so
sublimely hilly as that ridge up to which the ranked furrows rose like aspiring
angels. No valley, confused with needless cottages and towns, can have been so
utterly valleyish as that abyss into which the down-rushing furrows raged like
demons into the swirling pit.

It is the hard lines of discipline and equality that mark out a landscape and
give it all its mould and meaning. It is just because the lines of the furrow
are ugly and even that the landscape is living and superb. As I think I have
remarked elsewhere, the Republic is founded on the plough.

IT would be really interesting to know exactly why an intelligent person — by
which I mean a person with any sort of intelligence — can and does dislike
sight-seeing. Why does the idea of a char-à-banc full of tourists going to see
the birth-place of Nelson or the death-scene of Simon de Montfort strike a
strange chill to the soul? I can tell quite easily what this dim aversion to
tourists and their antiquities does not arise from — at least, in my case. Whatever
my other vices (and they are, of course, of a lurid cast), I can lay my hand on
my heart and say that it does not arise from a paltry contempt for the
antiquities, nor yet from the still more paltry contempt for the tourists. If
there is one thing more dwarfish and pitiful than irreverence for the past, it
is irreverence for the present, for the passionate and many-coloured procession
of life, which includes the char-à-banc among its many chariots and triumphal
cars. I know nothing so vulgar as that contempt for vulgarity which sneers at
the clerks on a Bank Holiday or the Cockneys on Margate sands. The man who
notices nothing about the clerk except his Cockney accent would have noticed
nothing about Simon de Montfort except his French accent. The man who jeers at
Jones for having dropped an “h” might have jeered at Nelson for having dropped
an arm. Scorn springs easily to the essentially vulgar-minded, and it is as
easy to gibe at Montfort as a foreigner or at Nelson as a cripple, as to gibe
at the struggling speech and the maimed bodies of the mass of our comic and
tragic race. If I shrink faintly from this affair of tourists and tombs, it is
certainly not because I am so profane as to think lightly either of the tombs
or the tourists. I reverence those great men who had the courage to die; I
reverence also these little men who have the courage to live.

Even if this be conceded, another suggestion may be made. It may be said that
antiquities and commonplace crowds are indeed good things, like violets and
geraniums; but they do not go together. A billycock is a beautiful object (it
may be eagerly urged), but it is not in the same style of architecture as Ely
Cathedral; it is a dome, a small rococo dome in the Renaissance manner, and
does not go with the pointed arches that assault heaven like spears. A
char-à-banc is lovely (it may be said) if placed upon a pedestal and worshipped
for its own sweet sake; but it does not harmonise with the curve and outline of
the old three-decker on which Nelson died; its beauty is quite of another
sort. Therefore (we will suppose our sage to argue) antiquity and democracy
should be kept separate, as inconsistent things. Things may be inconsistent in
time and space which are by no means inconsistent in essential value and idea. Thus
the Catholic Church has water for the new-born and oil for the dying: but she
never mixes oil and water.

This explanation is plausible; but I do not find it adequate. The first
objection is that the same smell of bathos haunts the soul in the case of all
deliberate and elaborate visits to “beauty spots,” even by persons of the most
elegant position or the most protected privacy. Specially visiting the
Coliseum by moonlight always struck me as being as vulgar as visiting it by
limelight. One millionaire standing on the top of Mont Blanc, one millionaire standing
in the desert by the Sphinx, one millionaire standing in the middle of
Stonehenge, is just as comic as one millionaire is anywhere else; and that is
saying a good deal. On the other hand, if the billycock had come privately and
naturally into Ely Cathedral, no enthusiast for Gothic harmony would think of objecting
to the billycock — so long, of course, as it was not worn on the head. But there
is indeed a much deeper objection to this theory of the two incompatible
excellences of antiquity and popularity. For the truth is that it has been
almost entirely the antiquities that have normally interested the populace; and
it has been almost entirely the populace who have systematically preserved the
antiquities. The Oldest Inhabitant has always been a clodhopper; I have never heard
of his being a gentleman. It is the peasants who preserve all traditions of
the sites of battles or the building of churches. It is they who remember, so
far as any one remembers, the glimpses of fairies or the graver wonders of
saints. In the classes above them the supernatural has been slain by the
supercilious. That is a true and tremendous text in Scripture which says that “where
there is no vision the people perish.” But it is equally true in practice that
where there is no people the visions perish.

The idea must be abandoned, then, that this feeling of faint dislike towards
popular sight-seeing is due to any inherent incompatibility between the idea of
special shrines and trophies and the idea of large masses of ordinary men. On
the contrary, these two elements of sanctity and democracy have been specially
connected and allied throughout history. The shrines and trophies were often
put up by ordinary men. They were always put up for ordinary men. To whatever
things the fastidious modern artist may choose to apply his theory of specialist
judgment, and an aristocracy of taste, he must necessarily find it difficult
really to apply it to such historic and monumental art. Obviously, a public
building is meant to impress the public. The most aristocratic tomb is a
democratic tomb, because it exists to be seen; the only aristocratic thing is
the decaying corpse, not the undecaying marble; and if the man wanted to be
thoroughly aristocratic, he should be buried in his own back-garden. The chapel
of the most narrow and exclusive sect is universal outside, even if it is
limited inside, its walls and windows confront all points of the compass and
all quarters of the cosmos. It may be small as a dwelling-place, but it is
universal as a monument; if its sectarians had really wished to be private they
should have met in a private house. Whenever and wherever we erect a national or
municipal hall, pillar, or statue, we are speaking to the crowd like a
demagogue.

The statue of every statesman offers itself for election as much as the
statesman himself. Every epitaph on a church slab is put up for the mob as
much as a placard in a General Election. And if we follow this track of
reflection we shall, I think, really find why it is that modern sight-seeing
jars on something in us, something that is not a caddish contempt for graves nor
an equally caddish contempt for cads. For, after all, there is many a
churchyard which consists mostly of dead cads; but that does not make it less
sacred or less sad.

The real explanation, I fancy, is this: that these cathedrals and columns of
triumph were meant, not for people more cultured and self-conscious than modern
tourists, but for people much rougher and more casual. Those leaps of live
stone like frozen fountains, were so placed and poised as to catch the eye of
ordinary inconsiderate men going about their daily business; and when they are
so seen they are never forgotten. The true way of reviving the magic of our
great minsters and historic sepulchres is not the one which Ruskin was always
recommending. It is not to be more careful of historic buildings. Nay, it is rather
to be more careless of them. Buy a bicycle in Maidstone to visit an aunt in
Dover, and you will see Canterbury Cathedral as it was built to be seen. Go
through London only as the shortest way between Croydon and Hampstead, and the
Nelson Column will (for the first time in your life) remind you of Nelson. You
will appreciate Hereford Cathedral if you have come for cider, not if you have
come for architecture. You will really see the Place Vendôme if you have come
on business, not if you have come for art. For it was for the simple and
laborious generations of men, practical, troubled about many things, that our
fathers reared those portents. There is, indeed, another element, not unimportant: the fact that people have gone to cathedrals to pray. But in discussing modern
artistic cathedral-lovers, we need not consider this.

WHEN men of science (or, more often, men who talk about science) speak of
studying history or human society scientifically they always forget that there
are two quite distinct questions involved. It may be that certain facts of the
body go with certain facts of the soul, but it by no means follows that a grasp
of such facts of the body goes with a grasp of the things of the soul. A man
may show very learnedly that certain mixtures of race make a happy community,
but he may be quite wrong (he generally is) about what communities are happy.
A man may explain scientifically how a certain physical type involves a really
bad man, but he may be quite wrong (he generally is) about which sort of man is
really bad. Thus his whole argument is useless, for he understands only one
half of the equation.

The drearier kind of don may come to me and say, “Celts are unsuccessful; look
at Irishmen, for instance.” To which I should reply, “You may know all about
Celts; but it is obvious that you know nothing about Irishmen. The Irish are
not in the least unsuccessful, unless it is unsuccessful to wander from their
own country over a great part of the earth, in which case the English are
unsuccessful too.” A man with a bumpy head may say to me (as a kind of New Year
greeting), “Fools have microcephalous skulls,” or what not. To which I shall
reply, “In order to be certain of that, you must be a good judge both of the
physical and of the mental fact. It is not enough that you should know a
microcephalous skull when you see it. It is also necessary that you should
know a fool when you see him; and I have a suspicion that you do not know a
fool when you see him, even after the most lifelong and intimate of all forms
of acquaintanceship.”

The trouble with most sociologists, criminologists, etc., is that while their
knowledge of their own details is exhaustive and subtle, their knowledge of man
and society, to which these are to be applied, is quite exceptionally
superficial and silly. They know everything about biology, but almost nothing
about life. Their ideas of history, for instance, are simply cheap and
uneducated. Thus some famous and foolish professor measured the skull of Charlotte
Corday to ascertain the criminal type; he had not historical knowledge enough
to know that if there is any “criminal type,” certainly Charlotte Corday had
not got it. The skull, I believe, afterwards turned out not to be Charlotte
Corday’s at all; but that is another story. The point is that the poor old man
was trying to match Charlotte Corday’s mind with her skull without knowing
anything whatever about her mind.

But I came yesterday upon a yet more crude and startling example.

In a popular magazine there is one of the usual articles about criminology;
about whether wicked men could be made good if their heads were taken to
pieces. As by far the wickedest men I know of are much too rich and powerful
ever to submit to the process, the speculation leaves me cold. I always notice
with pain, however, a curious absence of the portraits of living millionaires
from such galleries of awful examples; most of the portraits in which we are called
upon to remark the line of the nose or the curve of the forehead appear to be
the portraits of ordinary sad men, who stole because they were hungry or killed
because they were in a rage. The physical peculiarity seems to vary infinitely;
sometimes it is the remarkable square head, sometimes it is the unmistakable
round head; sometimes the learned draw attention to the abnormal development, sometimes
to the striking deficiency of the back of the head. I have tried to discover
what is the invariable factor, the one permanent mark of the scientific
criminal type; after exhaustive classification I have to come to the conclusion
that it consists in being poor.

But it was among the pictures in this article that I received the final shock;
the enlightenment which has left me in lasting possession of the fact that
criminologists are generally more ignorant than criminals. Among the starved
and bitter, but quite human, faces was one head, neat but old-fashioned, with
the powder of the 18th century and a certain almost pert primness in the dress which
marked the conventions of the upper middle-class about 1790. The face was lean
and lifted stiffly up, the eyes stared forward with a frightful sincerity, the
lip was firm with a heroic firmness; all the more pathetic because of a certain
delicacy and deficiency of male force. Without knowing who it was, one could
have guessed that it was a man in the manner of Shakespeare’s Brutus, a man of
piercingly pure intentions, prone to use government as a mere machine for morality,
very sensitive to the charge of inconsistency and a little too proud of his own
clean and honourable life. I say I should have known this almost from the face
alone, even if I had not known who it was.

But I did know who it was. It was Robespierre. And underneath the portrait of
this pale and too eager moralist were written these remarkable words: “Deficiency
of ethical instincts,” followed by something to the effect that he knew no
mercy (which is certainly untrue), and by some nonsense about a retreating
forehead, a peculiarity which he shared with Louis XVI and with half the people
of his time and ours.

Then it was that I measured the staggering distance between the knowledge and
the ignorance of science. Then I knew that all criminology might be worse than
worthless, because of its utter ignorance of that human material of which it is
supposed to be speaking. The man who could say that Robespierre was deficient
in ethical instincts is a man utterly to be disregarded in all calculations of
ethics. He might as well say that John Bunyan was deficient in ethical
instincts. You may say that Robespierre was morbid and unbalanced, and you may
say the same of Bunyan. But if these two men were morbid and unbalanced they
were morbid and unbalanced by feeling too much about morality, not by feeling
too little. You may say if you like that Robespierre was (in a negative sort
of way) mad. But if he was mad he was mad on ethics. He and a company of keen
and pugnacious men, intellectually impatient of unreason and wrong, resolved
that Europe should not be choked up in every channel by oligarchies and state
secrets that already stank. The work was the greatest that was ever given to
men to do except that which Christianity did in dragging Europe out of the
abyss of barbarism after the Dark Ages. But they did it, and no one else could
have done it.

Certainly we could not do it. We are not ready to fight all Europe on a point
of justice. We are not ready to fling our most powerful class as mere refuse
to the foreigner; we are not ready to shatter the great estates at a stroke; we
are not ready to trust ourselves in an awful moment of utter dissolution in
order to make all things seem intelligible and all men feel honourable
henceforth. We are not strong enough to be as strong as Danton. We are not
strong enough to be as weak as Robespierre. There is only one thing, it seems,
that we can do. Like a mob of children, we can play games upon this ancient
battlefield; we can pull up the bones and skulls of the tyrants and martyrs of
that unimaginable war; and we can chatter to each other childishly and
innocently about skulls that are imbecile and heads that are criminal.

I do not know whose heads are criminal, but I think I know whose are imbecile.

THE position of the rose among flowers is like that of the dog among animals.
It is not so much that both are domesticated as that we have some dim feeling
that they were always domesticated. There are wild roses and there are wild dogs.
I do not know the wild dogs; wild roses are very nice. But nobody ever thinks
of either of them if the name is abruptly mentioned in a gossip or a poem. On
the other hand, there are tame tigers and tame cobras, but if one says, “I have
a cobra in my pocket,” or “There is a tiger in the music-room,” the adjective “tame”
has to be somewhat hastily added. If one speaks of beasts one thinks first of
wild beasts; if of flowers one thinks first of wild flowers.

But there are two great exceptions; caught so completely into the wheel of man’s
civilisation, entangled so unalterably with his ancient emotions and images,
that the artificial product seems more natural than the natural. The dog is
not a part of natural history, but of human history; and the real rose grows in
a garden. All must regard the elephant as something tremendous, but tamed; and
many, especially in our great cultured centres, regard every bull as presumably
a mad bull. In the same way we think of most garden trees and plants as fierce
creatures of the forest or morass taught at last to endure the curb.

But with the dog and the rose this instinctive principle is reversed. With them
we think of the artificial as the archetype; the earth-born as the erratic
exception. We think vaguely of the wild dog as if he had run away, like the
stray cat. And we cannot help fancying that the wonderful wild rose of our
hedges has escaped by jumping over the hedge. Perhaps they fled together, the
dog and the rose: a singular and (on the whole) an imprudent elopement. Perhaps
the treacherous dog crept from the kennel, and the rebellious rose from the
flower-bed, and they fought their way out in company, one with teeth and the
other with thorns. Possibly this is why my dog becomes a wild dog when he sees
roses, and kicks them anywhere. Possibly this is why the wild rose is called a
dog-rose. Possibly not.

* * * * *

But there is this degree of dim barbaric truth in the quaint old-world legend
that I have just invented. That in these two cases the civilised product is
felt to be the fiercer, nay, even the wilder. Nobody seems to be afraid of a
wild dog: he is classed among the jackals and the servile beasts. The terrible
cave canem is written over man’s creation. When we read “Beware of the Dog,”
it means beware of the tame dog: for it is the tame dog that is terrible. He
is terrible in proportion as he is tame: it is his loyalty and his virtues that
are awful to the stranger, even the stranger within your gates; still more to
the stranger halfway over your gates. He is alarmed at such deafening and
furious docility; he flees from that great monster of mildness.

Well, I have much the same feeling when I look at the roses ranked red and
thick and resolute round a garden; they seem to me bold and even blustering. I
hasten to say that I know even less about my own garden than about anybody else’s
garden. I know nothing about roses, not even their names. I know only the
name Rose; and Rose is (in every sense of the word) a Christian name. It is
Christian in the one absolute and primordial sense of Christian — that it comes down
from the age of pagans. The rose can be seen, and even smelt, in Greek, Latin,
Provençal, Gothic, Renascence, and Puritan poems. Beyond this mere word Rose,
which (like wine and other noble words) is the same in all the tongues of white
men, I know literally nothing. I have heard the more evident and advertised
names. I know there is a flower which calls itself the Glory of Dijon — which I
had supposed to be its cathedral. In any case, to have produced a rose and a
cathedral is to have produced not only two very glorious and humane things, but
also (as I maintain) two very soldierly and defiant things. I also know there
is a rose called Marechal Niel — note once more the military ring.

And when I was walking round my garden the other day I spoke to my gardener (an
enterprise of no little valour) and asked him the name of a strange dark rose
that had somehow oddly taken my fancy. It was almost as if it reminded me of
some turbid element in history and the soul. Its red was not only swarthy, but
smoky; there was something congested and wrathful about its colour. It was at
once theatrical and sulky. The gardener told me it was called Victor Hugo.

* * * * *

Therefore it is that I feel all roses to have some secret power about them;
even their names may mean something in connection with themselves, in which
they differ from nearly all the sons of men. But the rose itself is royal and
dangerous; long as it has remained in the rich house of civilisation, it has
never laid off its armour. A rose always looks like a mediaeval gentleman of
Italy, with a cloak of crimson and a sword: for the thorn is the sword of the
rose.

And there is this real moral in the matter; that we have to remember that
civilisation as it goes on ought not perhaps to grow more fighting — but ought
to grow more ready to fight. The more valuable and reposeful is the order we
have to guard, the more vivid should be our ultimate sense of vigilance and
potential violence. And when I walk round a summer garden, I can understand how
those high mad lords at the end of the Middle Ages, just before their swords
clashed, caught at roses for their instinctive emblems of empire and rivalry. For
to me any such garden is full of the wars of the roses.

ONE silver morning I walked into a small grey town of stone, like twenty other
grey western towns, which happened to be called Glastonbury; and saw the magic
thorn of near two thousand years growing in the open air as casually as any
bush in my garden.

In Glastonbury, as in all noble and humane things, the myth is more important
than the history. One cannot say anything stronger of the strange old tale of
St. Joseph and the Thorn than that it dwarfs St. Dunstan. Standing among the
actual stones and shrubs one thinks of the first century and not of the tenth;
one’s mind goes back beyond the Saxons and beyond the greatest statesman of the
Dark Ages. The tale that Joseph of Arimathea came to Britain is presumably a
mere legend. But it is not by any means so incredible or preposterous a legend as
many modern people suppose. The popular notion is that the thing is quite
comic and inconceivable; as if one said that Wat Tyler went to Chicago, or that
John Bunyan discovered the North Pole. We think of Palestine as little,
localised and very private, of Christ’s followers as poor folk, astricti
glebis, rooted to their towns or trades; and we think of vast routes of travel
and constant world-communications as things of recent and scientific origin. But
this is wrong; at least, the last part of it is. It is part of that large and
placid lie that the rationalists tell when they say that Christianity arose in
ignorance and barbarism. Christianity arose in the thick of a brilliant and
bustling cosmopolitan civilisation. Long sea-voyages were not so quick, but
were quite as incessant as to-day; and though in the nature of things Christ
had not many rich followers, it is not unnatural to suppose that He had some.
And a Joseph of Arimathea may easily have been a Roman citizen with a yacht
that could visit Britain. The same fallacy is employed with the same partisan
motive in the case of the Gospel of St. John; which critics say could not have
been written by one of the first few Christians because of its Greek transcendentalism
and its Platonic tone. I am no judge of the philology, but every human being
is a divinely appointed judge of the philosophy: and the Platonic tone seems to
me to prove nothing at all. Palestine was not a secluded valley of barbarians;
it was an open province of a polyglot empire, overrun with all sorts of people
of all kinds of education. To take a rough parallel: suppose some great
prophet arose among the Boers in South Africa. The prophet himself might be a
simple or unlettered man. But no one who knows the modern world would be
surprised if one of his closest followers were a Professor from Heidelberg or
an M.A. from Oxford.

All this is not urged here with any notion of proving that the tale of the
thorn is not a myth; as I have said, it probably is a myth. It is urged with
the much more important object of pointing out the proper attitude towards such
myths. The proper attitude is one of doubt and hope and of a kind of light
mystery. The tale is certainly not impossible; as it is certainly not certain. And
through all the ages since the Roman Empire men have fed their healthy fancies
and their historical imagination upon the very twilight condition of such
tales. But to-day real agnosticism has declined along with real theology.
People cannot leave a creed alone; though it is the essence of a creed to be
clear. But neither can they leave a legend alone; though it is the essence of
a legend to be vague. That sane half scepticism which was found in all rustics,
in all ghost tales and fairy tales, seems to be a lost secret. Modern people
must make scientifically certain that St. Joseph did or did not go to
Glastonbury, despite the fact that it is now quite impossible to find out; and
that it does not, in a religious sense, very much matter. But it is essential
to feel that he may have gone to Glastonbury: all songs, arts, and dedications
branching and blossoming like the thorn, are rooted in some such sacred doubt. Taken
thus, not heavily like a problem but lightly like an old tale, the thing does
lead one along the road of very strange realities, and the thorn is found
growing in the heart of a very secret maze of the soul. Something is really
present in the place; some closer contact with the thing which covers Europe
but is still a secret. Somehow the grey town and the green bush touch across
the world the strange small country of the garden and the grave; there is
verily some communion between the thorn tree and the crown of thorns.

A man never knows what tiny thing will startle him to such ancestral and
impersonal tears. Piles of superb masonry will often pass like a common
panorama; and on this grey and silver morning the ruined towers of the
cathedral stood about me somewhat vaguely like grey clouds. But down in a
hollow where the local antiquaries are making a fruitful excavation, a
magnificent old ruffian with a pickaxe (whom I believe to have been St. Joseph
of Arimathea) showed me a fragment of the old vaulted roof which he had found
in the earth; and on the whitish grey stone there was just a faint brush of
gold. There seemed a piercing and swordlike pathos, an unexpected fragrance of
all forgotten or desecrated things, in the bare survival of that poor little
pigment upon the imperishable rock. To the strong shapes of the Roman and the
Gothic I had grown accustomed; but that weak touch of colour was at once tawdry
and tender, like some popular keepsake. Then I knew that all my fathers were men
like me; for the columns and arches were grave, and told of the gravity of the
builders; but here was one touch of their gaiety. I almost expected it to fade
from the stone as I stared. It was as if men had been able to preserve a
fragment of a sunset.

And then I remembered how the artistic critics have always praised the grave
tints and the grim shadows of the crumbling cloisters and abbey towers, and how
they themselves often dress up like Gothic ruins in the sombre tones of dim
grey walls or dark green ivy. I remembered how they hated almost all primary
things, but especially primary colours. I knew they were appreciating much more
delicately and truly than I the sublime skeleton and the mighty fungoids of the
dead Glastonbury. But I stood for an instant alive in the living Glastonbury, gay
with gold and coloured like the toy-book of a child.

IT was a warm golden evening, fit for October, and I was watching (with regret)
a lot of little black pigs being turned out of my garden, when the postman
handed to me, with a perfunctory haste which doubtless masked his emotion, the
Declaration of Futurism. If you ask me what Futurism is, I cannot tell you;
even the Futurists themselves seem a little doubtful; perhaps they are waiting
for the future to find out. But if you ask me what its Declaration is, I answer
eagerly; for I can tell you quite a lot about that. It is written by an Italian
named Marinetti, in a magazine which is called Poesia. It is headed “Declaration
of Futurism” in enormous letters; it is divided off with little numbers; and it
starts straight away like this: “1. We intend to glorify the love of danger,
the custom of energy, the strengt of daring. 2. The essential elements of our
poetry will be courage, audacity, and revolt. 3. Literature having up to now
glorified thoughtful immobility, ecstasy, and slumber, we wish to exalt the
aggressive movement, the feverish insomnia, running, the perilous leap, the
cuff and the blow.” While I am quite willing to exalt the cuff within reason,
it scarcely seems such an entirely new subject for literature as the Futurists
imagine. It seems to me that even through the slumber which fills the Siege of
Troy, the Song of Roland, and the Orlando Furioso, and in spite of the
thoughtful immobility which marks “Pantagruel,” “Henry V,” and the Ballad of
Chevy Chase, there are occasional gleams of an admiration for courage, a
readiness to glorify the love of danger, and even the “strengt of daring,” I
seem to remember, slightly differently spelt, somewhere in literature.

* * * * *

The distinction, however, seems to be that the warriors of the past went in for
tournaments, which were at least dangerous for themselves, while the Futurists
go in for motor-cars, which are mainly alarming for other people. It is the
Futurist in his motor who does the “aggressive movement,” but it is the pedestrians
who go in for the “running” and the “perilous leap.” Section No. 4 says, “We
declare that the splendour of the world has been enriched with a new form of
beauty, the beauty of speed. A race-automobile adorned with great pipes like
serpents with explosive breath. ... A race-automobile which seems to rush over
exploding powder is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.” It is also
much easier, if you have the money. It is quite clear, however, that you cannot
be a Futurist at all unless you are frightfully rich. Then follows this lucid and
soul-stirring sentence: “5. We will sing the praises of man holding the
flywheel of which the ideal steering-post traverses the earth impelled itself around
the circuit of its own orbit.” What a jolly song it would be — so hearty, and
with such a simple swing in it! I can imagine the Futurists round the fire in
a tavern trolling out in chorus some ballad with that incomparable refrain; shouting
over their swaying flagons some such words as these:

A notion came into my head as new as it was bright
That poems might be written on the subject of a fight;
No praise was given to Lancelot, Achilles, Nap or Corbett,
But we will sing the praises of man holding the flywheel of which the ideal
steering-post traverses the earth impelled itself around the circuit of its own
orbit.

Then lest it should be supposed that Futurism would be so weak as to permit any
democratic restraints upon the violence and levity of the luxurious classes,
there would be a special verse in honour of the motors also:

My fathers scaled the mountains in their pilgrimages far,
But I feel full
of energy while sitting in a car;
And petrol is the perfect wine, I lick it
and absorb it,
So we will sing the praises of man holding the flywheel of
which the ideal steering-post traverses the earth impelled itself around the
circuit of its own orbit.

Yes, it would be a rollicking catch. I wish there were space to finish the
song, or to detail all the other sections in the Declaration. Suffice it to say
that Futurism has a gratifying dislike both of Liberal politics and Christian
morals; I say gratifying because, however unfortunately the cross and the cap
of liberty have quarrelled, they are always united in the feeble hatred of such
silly megalomaniacs as these. They will “glorify war — the only true hygiene of
the world — militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of Anarchism, the
beautiful ideas which kill, and the scorn of woman.” They will “destroy
museums, libraries, and fight against moralism, feminism, and all utilitarian
cowardice.” The proclamation ends with an extraordinary passage which I cannot
understand at all, all about something that is going to happen to Mr. Marinetti
when he is forty. As far as I can make out he will then be killed by other
poets, who will be overwhelmed with love and admiration for him. “They will
come against us from far away, from everywhere, leaping on the cadence of their
first poems, clawing the air with crooked fingers and scenting at the Academy
gates the good smell of our decaying minds.” Well, it is satisfactory to be
told, however obscurely, that this sort of thing is coming to an end some day,
to be replaced by some other tomfoolery. And though I commonly refrain from
clawing the air with crooked fingers, I can assure Mr. Marinetti that this
omission does not disqualify me, and that I scent the good smell of his
decaying mind all right.

I think the only other point of Futurism is contained in this sentence: “It is
in Italy that we hurl this overthrowing and inflammatory Declaration, with
which to-day we found Futurism, for we will free Italy from her numberless
museums which cover her with countless cemeteries.” I think that rather sums
it up. The best way, one would think, of freeing oneself from a museum would be
not to go there. Mr. Marinetti’s fathers and grandfathers freed Italy from
prisons and torture chambers, places where people were held by force. They,
being in the bondage of “moralism,” attacked Governments as unjust, real
Governments, with real guns. Such was their utilitarian cowardice that they
would die in hundreds upon the bayonets of Austria. I can well imagine why Mr.
Marinetti in his motor-car does not wish to look back at the past. If there was
one thing that could make him look smaller even than before it is that roll of
dead men’s drums and that dream of Garibaldi going by. The old Radical ghosts
go by, more real than the living men, to assault I know not what ramparted city
in hell. And meanwhile the Futurist stands outside a museum in a warlike
attitude, and defiantly tells the official at the turnstile that he will never,
never come in.

There is a certain solid use in fools. It is not so much that they rush in
where angels fear to tread, but rather that they let out what devils intend to
do. Some perversion of folly will float about nameless and pervade a whole
society; then some lunatic gives it a name, and henceforth it is harmless.
With all really evil things, when the danger has appeared the danger is over. Now
it may be hoped that the self-indulgent sprawlers of Poesia have put a name
once and for all to their philosophy. In the case of their philosophy, to put
a name to it is to put an end to it. Yet their philosophy has been very
widespread in our time; it could hardly have been pointed and finished except
by this perfect folly. The creed of which (please God) this is the flower and
finish consists ultimately in this statement: that it is bold and spirited to
appeal to the future. Now, it is entirely weak and half-witted to appeal to
the future. A brave man ought to ask for what he wants, not for what he
expects to get. A brave man who wants Atheism in the future calls himself an
Atheist; a brave man who wants Socialism, a Socialist; a brave man who wants
Catholicism, a Catholic. But a weak-minded man who does not know what he wants
in the future calls himself a Futurist.

* * * * *

They have driven all the pigs away. Oh that they had driven away the prigs,
and left the pigs! The sky begins to droop with darkness and all birds and
blossoms to descend unfaltering into the healthy underworld where things
slumber and grow. There was just one true phrase of Mr. Marinetti’s about
himself: “the feverish insomnia.” The whole universe is pouring headlong to
the happiness of the night. It is only the madman who has not the courage to
sleep.

THE Duc de Chambertin-Pommard was a small but lively relic of a really aristocratic
family, the members of which were nearly all Atheists up to the time of the
French Revolution, but since that event (beneficial in such various ways) had
been very devout. He was a Royalist, a Nationalist, and a perfectly sincere
patriot in that particular style which consists of ceaselessly asserting that
one’s country is not so much in danger as already destroyed. He wrote cheery
little articles for the Royalist Press entitled “The End of France” or “The
Last Cry,” or what not, and he gave the final touches to a picture of the
Kaiser riding across a pavement of prostrate Parisians with a glow of patriotic
exultation. He was quite poor, and even his relations had no money. He walked
briskly to all his meals at a little open café, and he looked just like
everybody else.

Living in a country where aristocracy does not exist, he had a high opinion of
it. He would yearn for the swords and the stately manners of the Pommards
before the Revolution — most of whom had been (in theory) Republicans. But he
turned with a more practical eagerness to the one country in Europe where the
tricolour has never flown and men have never been roughly equalised before the
State. The beacon and comfort of his life was England, which all Europe sees
clearly as the one pure aristocracy that remains. He had, moreover, a mild
taste for sport and kept an English bulldog, and he believed the English to be
a race of bulldogs, of heroic squires, and hearty yeomen vassals, because he
read all this in English Conservative papers, written by exhausted little Levantine
clerks. But his reading was naturally for the most part in the French
Conservative papers (though he knew English well), and it was in these that he
first heard of the horrible Budget. There he read of the confiscatory
revolution planned by the Lord Chancellor of the Exchequer, the sinister
Georges Lloyd. He also read how chivalrously Prince Arthur Balfour of Burleigh had
defied that demagogue, assisted by Austen the Lord Chamberlain and the gay and
witty Walter Lang. And being a brisk partisan and a capable journalist, he
decided to pay England a special visit and report to his paper upon the
struggle.

He drove for an eternity in an open fly through beautiful woods, with a letter
of introduction in his pocket to one duke, who was to introduce him to another
duke. The endless and numberless avenues of bewildering pine woods gave him a
queer feeling that he was driving through the countless corridors of a dream.
Yet the vast silence and freshness healed his irritation at modern ugliness and
unrest. It seemed a background fit for the return of chivalry. In such a forest
a king and all his court might lose themselves hunting or a knight errant might
perish with no companion but God. The castle itself when he reached it was
somewhat smaller than he had expected, but he was delighted with its romantic
and castellated outline. He was just about to alight when somebody opened two
enormous gates at the side and the vehicle drove briskly through.

“That is not the house?” he inquired politely of the driver.

“No, sir,” said the driver, controlling the corners of his mouth. “The lodge,
sir.”

“Indeed,” said the Duc de Chambertin-Pommard, “that is where the Duke’s land
begins?”

“Oh no, sir,” said the man, quite in distress. “We’ve been in his Grace’s land
all day.”

The Frenchman thanked him and leant back in the carriage, feeling as if
everything were incredibly huge and vast, like Gulliver in the country of the
Brobdingnags.

He got out in front of a long façade of a somewhat severe building, and a little
careless man in a shooting jacket and knickerbockers ran down the steps. He
had a weak, fair moustache and dull, blue, babyish eyes; his features were
insignificant, but his manner extremely pleasant and hospitable. This was the
Duke of Aylesbury, perhaps the largest landowner in Europe, and known only as a
horsebreeder until he began to write abrupt little letters about the Budget. He
led the French Duke upstairs, talking trivialties in a hearty way, and there
presented him to another and more important English oligarch, who got up from a
writing-desk with a slightly senile jerk. He had a gleaming bald head and
glasses; the lower part of his face was masked with a short, dark beard, which
did not conceal a beaming smile, not unmixed with sharpness. He stooped a
little as he ran, like some sedentary head clerk or cashier; and even without
the cheque-book and papers on his desk would have given the impression of a
merchant or man of business. He was dressed in a light grey check jacket. He
was the Duke of Windsor, the great Unionist statesman. Between these two
loose, amiable men, the little Gaul stood erect in his black frock coat, with
the monstrous gravity of French ceremonial good manners. This stiffness led the
Duke of Windsor to put him at his ease (like a tenant), and he said, rubbing
his hands:

“I was delighted with your letter ... delighted. I shall be very pleased if I
can give you — er — any details.”

“My visit,” said the Frenchman, “scarcely suffices for the scientific
exhaustion of detail. I seek only the idea. The idea, that is always the
immediate thing.”

“Quite so,” said the other rapidly; “quite so ... the idea.”

Feeling somehow that it was his turn (the English Duke having done all that
could be required of him) Pommard had to say: “I mean the idea of
aristocracy. I regard this as the last great battle for the idea. Aristocracy,
like any other thing, must justify itself to mankind. Aristocracy is good
because it preserves a picture of human dignity in a world where that dignity is
often obscured by servile necessities. Aristocracy alone can keep a certain
high reticence of soul and body, a certain noble distance between the sexes.”

The Duke of Aylesbury, who had a clouded recollection of having squirted soda-water
down the neck of a Countess on the previous evening, looked somewhat gloomy, as
if lamenting the theoretic spirit of the Latin race. The elder Duke laughed
heartily, and said: “Well, well, you know; we English are horribly practical. With
us the great question is the land. Out here in the country ... do you know
this part?”

“Yes, yes,” cried the Frenchmen eagerly. “I see what you mean. The country!
the old rustic life of humanity! A holy war upon the bloated and filthy
towns. What right have these anarchists to attack your busy and prosperous
countrysides? Have they not thriven under your management? Are not the
English villages always growing larger and gayer under the enthusiastic
leadership of their encouraging squires? Have you not the Maypole? Have you
not Merry England?”

The Duke of Aylesbury made a noise in his throat, and then said very
indistinctly: “They all go to London.”

“All go to London?” repeated Pommard, with a blank stare. “Why?”

This time nobody answered, and Pommard had to attack again.

“The spirit of aristocracy is essentially opposed to the greed of the
industrial cities. Yet in France there are actually one or two nobles so vile
as to drive coal and gas trades, and drive them hard.” The Duke of Windsor
looked at the carpet. The Duke of Aylesbury went and looked out of the window. At
length the latter said: “That’s rather stiff, you know. One has to look after
one’s own business in town as well.”

“Do not say it,” cried the little Frenchman, starting up. “I tell you all
Europe is one fight between business and honour. If we do not fight for honour,
who will? What other right have we poor two-legged sinners to titles and
quartered shields except that we staggeringly support some idea of giving
things which cannot be demanded and avoiding things which cannot be punished? Our
only claim is to be a wall across Christendom against the Jew pedlars and
pawnbrokers, against the Goldsteins and the — ”

The Duke of Aylesbury swung round with his hands in his pockets.

“Oh, I say,” he said, “you’ve been readin’ Lloyd George. Nobody but dirty
Radicals can say a word against Goldstein.”

He intended to be impressive, but there was something in the Frenchman’s eye
that is not so easily impressed; there shone there that steel which is the mind
of France,

“Gentlemen,” he said, “I think I have all the details now. You have ruled
England for four hundred years. By your own account you have not made the
countryside endurable to men. By your own account you have helped the victory
of vulgarity and smoke. And by your own account you are hand and glove with
those very money-grubbers and adventurers whom gentlemen have no other business
but to keep at bay. I do not know what your people will do; but my people
would kill you.”

Some seconds afterwards he had left the Duke’s house, and some hours afterwards
the Duke’s estate.

I SUPPOSE that, taking this summer as a whole, people will not call it an
appropriate time for praising the English climate. But for my part I will
praise the English climate till I die — even if I die of the English climate.
There is no weather so good as English weather. Nay, in a real sense there is
no weather at all anywhere but in England. In France you have much sun and
some rain; in Italy you have hot winds and cold winds; in Scotland and Ireland
you have rain, either thick or thin; in America you have hells of heat and
cold, and in the Tropics you have sunstrokes varied by thunderbolts. But all
these you have on a broad and brutal scale, and you settle down into
contentment or despair. Only in our own romantic country do you have the
strictly romantic thing called Weather; beautiful and changing as a woman. The
great English landscape painters (neglected now like everything that is
English) have this salient distinction: that the Weather is not the atmosphere
of their pictures; it is the subject of their pictures. They paint portraits of
the Weather. The Weather sat to Constable. The Weather posed for Turner, and a
deuce of a pose it was. This cannot truly be said of the greatest of their
continental models or rivals. Poussin and Claude painted objects, ancient
cities or perfect Arcadian shepherds through a clear medium of the climate.
But in the English painters Weather is the hero; with Turner an Adelphi hero,
taunting, flashing and fighting, melodramatic but really magnificent. The
English climate, a tall and terrible protagonist, robed in rain and thunder and
snow and sunlight, fills the whole canvas and the whole foreground. I admit the
superiority of many other French things besides French art. But I will not
yield an inch on the superiority of English weather and weather-painting. Why,
the French have not even got a word for Weather: and you must ask for the
weather in French as if you were asking for the time in English.

Then, again, variety of climate should always go with stability of abode. The
weather in the desert is monotonous; and as a natural consequence the Arabs
wander about, hoping it may be different somewhere. But an Englishman’s house
is not only his castle; it is his fairy castle. Clouds and colours of every
varied dawn and eve are perpetually touching and turning it from clay to gold,
or from gold to ivory. There is a line of woodland beyond a corner of my garden
which is literally different on every one of the three hundred and sixty-five
days. Sometimes it seems as near as a hedge, and sometimes as far as a faint
and fiery evening cloud. The same principle (by the way) applies to the
difficult problem of wives. Variability is one of the virtues of a woman. It
avoids the crude requirement of polygamy. So long as you have one good wife
you are sure to have a spiritual harem.

Now, among the heresies that are spoken in this matter is the habit of calling
a grey day a “colourless” day. Grey is a colour, and can be a very powerful
and pleasing colour. There is also an insulting style of speech about “one
grey day just like another.” You might as well talk about one green tree just
like another. A grey clouded sky is indeed a canopy between us and the sun; so
is a green tree, if it comes to that. But the grey umbrellas differ as much as
the green in their style and shape, in their tint and tilt. One day may be grey
like steel, and another grey like dove’s plumage. One may seem grey like the
deathly frost, and another grey like the smoke of substantial kitchens. No
things could seem further apart than the doubt of grey and the decision of
scarlet. Yet grey and red can mingle, as they do in the morning clouds: and
also in a sort of warm smoky stone of which they build the little towns in the
west country. In those towns even the houses that are wholly grey have a glow
in them; as if their secret firesides were such furnaces of hospitality as
faintly to transfuse the walls like walls of cloud. And wandering in those
westland parts I did once really find a sign-post pointing up a steep crooked
path to a town that was called Clouds. I did not climb up to it; I feared that
either the town would not be good enough for the name, or I should not be good
enough for the town. Anyhow, the little hamlets of the warm grey stone have a
geniality which is not achieved by all the artistic scarlet of the suburbs; as
if it were better to warm one’s hands at the ashes of Glastonbury than at the
painted flames of Croydon.

Again, the enemies of grey (those astute, daring and evil-minded men) are fond
of bringing forward the argument that colours suffer in grey weather, and that
strong sunlight is necessary to all the hues of heaven and earth. Here again
there are two words to be said; and it is essential to distinguish. It is true
that sun is needed to burnish and bring into bloom the tertiary and dubious
colours; the colour of peat, pea-soup, Impressionist sketches, brown velvet coats,
olives, grey and blue slates, the complexions of vegetarians, the tints of
volcanic rock, chocolate, cocoa, mud, soot, slime, old boots; the delicate
shades of these do need the sunlight to bring out the faint beauty that often
clings to them. But if you have a healthy negro taste in colour, if you choke
your garden with poppies and geraniums, if you paint your house sky-blue and
scarlet, if you wear, let us say, a golden top-hat and a crimson frock-coat, you
will not only be visible on the greyest day, but you will notice that your
costume and environment produce a certain singular effect. You will find, I
mean, that rich colours actually look more luminous on a grey day, because they
are seen against a sombre background and seem to be burning with a lustre of
their own. Against a dark sky all flowers look like fireworks. There is
something strange about them, at once vivid and secret, like flowers traced in
fire in the phantasmal garden of a witch. A bright blue sky is necessarily the
high light of the picture; and its brightness kills all the bright blue
flowers. But on a grey day the larkspur looks like fallen heaven; the red daisies
are really the red lost eyes of day; and the sunflower is the vice-regent of
the sun.

Lastly, there is this value about the colour that men call colourless; that it
suggests in some way the mixed and troubled average of existence, especially in
its quality of strife and expectation and promise. Grey is a colour that always
seems on the eve of changing to some other colour; of brightening into blue or
blanching into white or bursting into green and gold. So we may be perpetually
reminded of the indefinite hope that is in doubt itself; and when there is grey
weather in our hills or grey hairs in our heads, perhaps they may still remind
us of the morning.

I HAVE now lived for about two months in the country, and have gathered the
last rich autumnal fruit of a rural life, which is a strong desire to see
London. Artists living in my neighbourhood talk rapturously of the rolling
liberty of the landscape, the living peace of woods. But I say to them (with a
slight Buckinghamshire accent), “Ah, that is how Cockneys feel. For us real
old country people the country is reality; it is the town that is romance.
Nature is as plain as one of her pigs, as commonplace, as comic, and as
healthy. But civilisation is full of poetry, even if it be sometimes an evil
poetry. The streets of London are paved with gold; that is, with the very
poetry of avarice.” With these typically bucolic words I touch my hat and go
ambling away on a stick, with a stiffness of gait proper to the Oldest
Inhabitant; while in my more animated moments I am taken for the Village Idiot.
Exchanging heavy but courteous salutations with other gaffers, I reach the
station, where I ask for a ticket for London where the king lives. Such a
journey, mingled of provincial fascination and fear, did I successfully perform
only a few days ago; and alone and helpless in the capital, found myself in the
tangle of roads around the Marble Arch.

A faint prejudice may possess the mind that I have slightly exaggerated my
rusticity and remoteness. And yet it is true as I came to that corner of the
Park that, for some unreasonable reason of mood, I saw all London as a strange
city and the civilisation itself as one enormous whim. The Marble Arch itself,
in its new insular position, with traffic turning dizzily all about it, struck
me as a placid monstrosity. What could be wilder than to have a huge arched
gateway, with people going everywhere except under it? If I took down my front
door and stood it up all by itself in the middle of my back garden, my village
neighbours (in their simplicity) would probably stare. Yet the Marble Arch is
now precisely that; an elaborate entrance and the only place by which no one
can enter. By the new arrangement its last weak pretence to be a gate has been
taken away. The cabman still cannot drive through it, but he can have the
delights of riding round it, and even (on foggy nights) the rapture of running
into it. It has been raised from the rank of a fiction to the dignity of an
obstacle.

As I began to walk across a corner of the Park, this sense of what is strange
in cities began to mingle with some sense of what is stern as well as strange.
It was one of those queer-coloured winter days when a watery sky changes to
pink and grey and green, like an enormous opal. The trees stood up grey and
angular, as if in attitudes of agony; and here and there on benches under the
trees sat men as grey and angular as they. It was cold even for me, who had
eaten a large breakfast and purposed to eat a perfectly Gargantuan lunch; it
was colder for the men under the trees. And to eastward through the opalescent
haze, the warmer whites and yellows of the houses in Park-lane shone as
unsubstantially as if the clouds themselves had taken on the shape of mansions
to mock the men who sat there in the cold. But the mansions were real — like
the mockery.

No one worth calling a man allows his moods to change his convictions; but it
is by moods that we understand other men’s convictions. The bigot is not he who
knows he is right; every sane man knows he is right. The bigot is he whose
emotions and imagination are too cold and weak to feel how it is that other men
go wrong. At that moment I felt vividly how men might go wrong, even unto
dynamite. If one of those huddled men under the trees had stood up and asked for
rivers of blood, it would have been erroneous — but not irrelevant. It would
have been appropriate and in the picture; that lurid grey picture of insolence
on one side and impotence on the other. It may be true (on the whole it is)
that this social machine we have made is better than anarchy. Still, it is a
machine; and we have made it. It does hold those poor men helpless: and it
does lift those rich men high ... and such men — good Lord! By the time I
flung myself on a bench beside another man I was half inclined to try anarchy
for a change.

The other was of more prosperous appearance than most of the men on such seats;
still, he was not what one calls a gentleman, and had probably worked at some
time like a human being. He was a small, sharp-faced man, with grave, staring
eyes, and a beard somewhat foreign. His clothes were black; respectable and
yet casual; those of a man who dressed conventionally because it was a bore to
dress unconventionally — as it is. Attracted by this and other things, and
wanting an outburst for my bitter social feelings, I tempted him into speech, first
about the cold, and then about the General Election. To this the respectable
man replied:

“Well, I don’t belong to any party myself. I’m an Anarchist.”

I looked up and almost expected fire from heaven. This coincidence was like the
end of the world. I had sat down feeling that somehow or other Park-lane must
be pulled down; and I had sat down beside the man who wanted to pull it down. I
bowed in silence for an instant under the approaching apocalypse; and in that
instant the man turned sharply and started talking like a torrent.

“Understand me,” he said. “Ordinary people think an Anarchist means a man with
a bomb in his pocket. Herbert Spencer was an Anarchist. But for that fatal
admission of his on page 793, he would be a complete Anarchist. Otherwise, he
agrees wholly with Pidge.”

This was uttered with such blinding rapidity of syllabification as to be a
better test of teetotalism than the Scotch one of saying “Biblical criticism”
six times. I attempted to speak, but he began again with the same rippling
rapidity.

“You will say that Pidge also admits government in that tenth chapter so easily
misunderstood. Bolger has attacked Pidge on those lines. But Bolger has no
scientific training. Bolger is a psychometrist, but no sociologist. To any
one who has combined a study of Pidge with the earlier and better discoveries
of Kruxy, the fallacy is quite clear. Bolger confounds social coercion with
coercional social action.”

His rapid rattling mouth shut quite tight suddenly, and he looked steadily and
triumphantly at me, with his head on one side. I opened my mouth, and the mere
motion seemed to sting him to fresh verbal leaps.

“Yes,” he said, “that’s all very well. The Finland Group has accepted Bolger.
But,” he said, suddenly lifting a long finger as if to stop me, “but — Pidge has
replied. His pamphlet is published. He has proved that Potential Social Rebuke
is not a weapon of the true Anarchist. He has shown that just as religious
authority and political authority have gone, so must emotional authority and
psychological authority. He has shown — ”

I stood up in a sort of daze. “I think you remarked,” I said feebly, “that the
mere common populace do not quite understand Anarchism — ”

“Quite so,” he said with burning swiftness; “as I said, they think any
Anarchist is a man with a bomb, whereas — ”

“But great heavens, man!” I said; “it’s the man with the bomb that I
understand! I wish you had half his sense. What do I care how many German
dons tie themselves in knots about how this society began? My only interest is
about how soon it will end. Do you see those fat white houses over in
Park-lane, where your masters live?”

He assented and muttered something about concentrations of capital.

“Well,” I said, “if the time ever comes when we all storm those houses, will
you tell me one thing? Tell me how we shall do it without authority? Tell me
how you will have an army of revolt without discipline?”

For the first instant he was doubtful; and I had bidden him farewell, and
crossed the street again, when I saw him open his mouth and begin to run after
me. He had remembered something out of Pidge.

I escaped, however, and as I leapt on an omnibus I saw again the enormous emblem
of the Marble Arch. I saw that massive symbol of the modern mind: a door with
no house to it; the gigantic gate of Nowhere.

READERS of Mr. Bernard Shaw and other modern writers may be interested to know
that the Superman has been found. I found him; he lives in South Croydon. My
success will be a great blow to Mr. Shaw, who has been following quite a false
scent, and is now looking for the creature in Blackpool; and as for Mr. Wells’s
notion of generating him out of gases in a private laboratory, I always thought
it doomed to failure. I assure Mr. Wells that the Superman at Croydon was born
in the ordinary way, though he himself, of course, is anything but ordinary.

Nor are his parents unworthy of the wonderful being whom they have given to the
world. The name of Lady Hypatia Smythe-Browne (now Lady Hypatia Hagg) will
never be forgotten in the East End, where she did such splendid social work.
Her constant cry of “Save the children!” referred to the cruel neglect of children’s
eyesight involved in allowing them to play with crudely painted toys. She
quoted unanswerable statistics to prove that children allowed to look at violet
and vermilion often suffered from failing eyesight in their extreme old age;
and it was owing to her ceaseless crusade that the pestilence of the
Monkey-on-the-Stick was almost swept from Hoxton. The devoted worker would
tramp the streets untiringly, taking away the toys from all the poor children,
who were often moved to tears by her kindness. Her good work was interrupted, partly
by a new interest in the creed of Zoroaster, and partly by a savage blow from
an umbrella. It was inflicted by a dissolute Irish apple-woman, who, on
returning from some orgy to her ill-kept apartment, found Lady Hypatia in the
bedroom taking down an oleograph, which, to say the least of it, could not
really elevate the mind. At this the ignorant and partly intoxicated Celt dealt
the social reformer a severe blow, adding to it an absurd accusation of theft. The
lady’s exquisitely balanced mind received a shock, and it was during a short
mental illness that she married Dr. Hagg.

Of Dr. Hagg himself I hope there is no need to speak. Any one even slightly
acquainted with those daring experiments in Neo-Individualist Eugenics, which
are now the one absorbing interest of the English democracy, must know his name
and often commend it to the personal protection of an impersonal power. Early
in life he brought to bear that ruthless insight into the history of religions
which he had gained in boyhood as an electrical engineer. Later he became one
of our greatest geologists; and achieved that bold and bright outlook upon the
future of Socialism which only geology can give. At first there seemed
something like a rift, a faint, but perceptible, fissure, between his views and
those of his aristocratic wife. For she was in favour (to use her own powerful
epigram) of protecting the poor against themselves; while he declared
pitilessly, in a new and striking metaphor, that the weakest must go to the
wall. Eventually, however, the married pair perceived an essential union in the
unmistakably modern character of both their views, and in this enlightening and
intelligible formula their souls found peace. The result is that this union of
the two highest types of our civilisation, the fashionable lady and the all but
vulgar medical man, has been blessed by the birth of the Superman, that being
whom all the labourers in Battersea are so eagerly expecting night and day.

* * * * *

I found the house of Dr. and Lady Hypatia Hagg without much difficulty; it is
situated in one of the last straggling streets of Croydon, and overlooked by a
line of poplars. I reached the door towards the twilight, and it was natural
that I should fancifully see something dark and monstrous in the dim bulk of
that house which contained the creature who was more marvellous than the
children of men. When I entered the house I was received with exquisite
courtesy by Lady Hypatia and her husband; but I found much greater difficulty
in actually seeing the Superman, who is now about fifteen years old, and is
kept by himself in a quiet room. Even my conversation with the father and
mother did not quite clear up the character of this mysterious being. Lady
Hypatia, who has a pale and poignant face, and is clad in those impalpable and
pathetic greys and greens with which she has brightened so many homes in
Hoxton, did not appear to talk of her offspring with any of the vulgar vanity
of an ordinary human mother. I took a bold step and asked if the Superman was
nice looking.

“He creates his own standard, you see,” she replied, with a slight sigh. “Upon
that plane he is more than Apollo. Seen from our lower plane, of course — ” And
she sighed again.

I had a horrible impulse, and said suddenly, “Has he got any hair?”

There was a long and painful silence, and then Dr. Hagg said smoothly: “Everything
upon that plane is different; what he has got is not ... well, not, of course,
what we call hair ... but — ”

“Don’t you think,” said his wife, very softly, “don’t you think that really,
for the sake of argument, when talking to the mere public, one might call it
hair?”

“Perhaps you are right,” said the doctor after a few moments’ reflection. “In
connection with hair like that one must speak in parables.”

“Well, what on earth is it,” I asked in some irritation, “if it isn’t hair? Is
it feathers?”

“Not feathers, as we understand feathers,” answered Hagg in an awful voice.

I got up in some irritation. “Can I see him, at any rate?” I asked. “I am a
journalist, and have no earthly motives except curiosity and personal vanity.
I should like to say that I had shaken hands with the Superman.”

The husband and wife had both got heavily to their feet, and stood,
embarrassed. “Well, of course, you know,” said Lady Hypatia, with the really
charming smile of the aristocratic hostess. “You know he can’t exactly shake
hands ... not hands, you know. ... The structure, of course — ”

I broke out of all social bounds, and rushed at the door of the room which I
thought to contain the incredible creature. I burst it open; the room was pitch
dark. But from in front of me came a small sad yelp, and from behind me a
double shriek.

“You have done it, now!” cried Dr. Hagg, burying his bald brow in his hands. “You
have let in a draught on him; and he is dead.”

As I walked away from Croydon that night I saw men in black carrying out a
coffin that was not of any human shape. The wind wailed above me, whirling the
poplars, so that they drooped and nodded like the plumes of some cosmic
funeral. “It is, indeed,” said Dr. Hagg, “the whole universe weeping over the
frustration of its most magnificent birth.” But I thought that there was a hoot
of laughter in the high wail of the wind.

WITHIN a stone’s throw of my house they are building another house. I am glad
they are building it, and I am glad it is within a stone’s throw; quite well
within it, with a good catapult. Nevertheless, I have not yet cast the first
stone at the new house — not being, strictly speaking, guiltless myself in the
matter of new houses. And, indeed, in such cases there is a strong protest to
be made. The whole curse of the last century has been what is called the Swing of
the Pendulum; that is, the idea that Man must go alternately from one extreme
to the other. It is a shameful and even shocking fancy; it is the denial of
the whole dignity of mankind. When Man is alive he stands still. It is only
when he is dead that he swings. But whenever one meets modern thinkers (as one
often does) progressing towards a madhouse, one always finds, on inquiry, that
they have just had a splendid escape from another madhouse. Thus, hundreds of
people become Socialists, not because they have tried Socialism and found it
nice, but because they have tried Individualism and found it particularly
nasty. Thus, many embrace Christian Science solely because they are quite sick
of heathen science; they are so tired of believing that everything is matter
that they will even take refuge in the revolting fable that everything is mind.
Man ought to march somewhere. But modern man (in his sick reaction) is ready
to march nowhere — so long as it is the Other End of Nowhere.

The case of building houses is a strong instance of this. Early in the nineteenth
century our civilisation chose to abandon the Greek and medieval idea of a
town, with walls, limited and defined, with a temple for faith and a
market-place for politics; and it chose to let the city grow like a jungle with
blind cruelty and bestial unconsciousness; so that London and Liverpool are the
great cities we now see. Well, people have reacted against that; they have
grown tired of living in a city which is as dark and barbaric as a forest only
not as beautiful, and there has been an exodus into the country of those who
could afford it, and some I could name who can’t. Now, as soon as this quite rational
recoil occurred, it flew at once to the opposite extreme. People went about
with beaming faces, boasting that they were twenty-three miles from a station.
Rubbing their hands, they exclaimed in rollicking asides that their butcher
only called once a month, and that their baker started out with fresh hot loaves
which were quite stale before they reached the table. A man would praise his
little house in a quiet valley, but gloomily admit (with a slight shake of the
head) that a human habitation on the distant horizon was faintly discernible on
a clear day. Rival ruralists would quarrel about which had the most completely inconvenient
postal service; and there were many jealous heartburnings if one friend found
out any uncomfortable situation which the other friend had thoughtlessly
overlooked.

In the feverish summer of this fanaticism there arose the phrase that this or
that part of England is being “built over.” Now, there is not the slightest
objection, in itself, to England being built over by men, any more than there
is to its being (as it is already) built over by birds, or by squirrels, or by
spiders. But if birds’ nests were so thick on a tree that one could see nothing
but nests and no leaves at all, I should say that bird civilisation was
becoming a bit decadent. If whenever I tried to walk down the road I found the
whole thoroughfare one crawling carpet of spiders, closely interlocked, I
should feel a distress verging on distaste. If one were at every turn crowded,
elbowed, overlooked, overcharged, sweated, rack-rented, swindled, and sold up
by avaricious and arrogant squirrels, one might at last remonstrate. But the
great towns have grown intolerable solely because of such suffocating
vulgarities and tyrannies. It is not humanity that disgusts us in the huge
cities; it is inhumanity. It is not that there are human beings; but that they
are not treated as such. We do not, I hope, dislike men and women; we only
dislike their being made into a sort of jam: crushed together so that they are
not merely powerless but shapeless. It is not the presence of people that makes
London appalling. It is merely the absence of The People.

Therefore, I dance with joy to think that my part of England is being built
over, so long as it is being built over in a human way at human intervals and
in a human proportion. So long, in short, as I am not myself built over, like a
pagan slave buried in the foundations of a temple, or an American clerk in a
star-striking pagoda of flats, I am delighted to see the faces and the homes of
a race of bipeds, to which I am not only attracted by a strange affection, but
to which also (by a touching coincidence) I actually happen to belong. I am
not one desiring deserts. I am not Timon of Athens; if my town were Athens I
would stay in it. I am not Simeon Stylites; except in the mournful sense that
every Saturday I find myself on the top of a newspaper column. I am not in the
desert repenting of some monstrous sins; at least, I am repenting of them all
right, but not in the desert. I do not want the nearest human house to be too
distant to see; that is my objection to the wilderness. But neither do I want
the nearest human house to be too close to see; that is my objection to the
modern city. I love my fellow-man; I do not want him so far off that I can only
observe anything of him through a telescope, nor do I want him so close that I
can examine parts of him with a microscope. I want him within a stone’s throw
of me; so that whenever it is really necessary, I may throw the stone.

Perhaps, after all, it may not be a stone. Perhaps, after all, it may be a
bouquet, or a snowball, or a firework, or a Free Trade Loaf; perhaps they will
ask for a stone and I shall give them bread. But it is essential that they
should be within reach: how can I love my neighbour as myself if he gets out
of range for snowballs? There should be no institution out of the reach of an
indignant or admiring humanity. I could hit the nearest house quite well with
the catapult; but the truth is that the catapult belongs to a little boy I
know, and, with characteristic youthful selfishness, he has taken it away.

THE preceding essay is about a half-built house upon my private horizon; I
wrote it sitting in a garden-chair; and as, though it was a week ago, I have
scarcely moved since then (to speak of), I do not see why I should not go on
writing about it. Strictly speaking, I have moved; I have even walked across a
field — a field of turf all fiery in our early summer sunlight — and studied the
early angular red skeleton which has turned golden in the sun. It is odd that
the skeleton of a house is cheerful when the skeleton of a man is mournful,
since we only see it after the man is destroyed. At least, we think the
skeleton is mournful; the skeleton himself does not seem to think so. Anyhow,
there is something strangely primary and poetic about this sight of the
scaffolding and main lines of a human building; it is a pity there is no
scaffolding round a human baby. One seems to see domestic life as the daring and
ambitious thing that it is, when one looks at those open staircases and empty
chambers, those spirals of wind and open halls of sky. Ibsen said that the art
of domestic drama was merely to knock one wall out of the four walls of a
drawing-room. I find the drawing-room even more impressive when all four walls
are knocked out.

I have never understood what people mean by domesticity being tame; it seems to
me one of the wildest of adventures. But if you wish to see how high and harsh
and fantastic an adventure it is, consider only the actual structure of a house
itself. A man may march up in a rather bored way to bed; but at least he is
mounting to a height from which he could kill himself. Every rich, silent,
padded staircase, with banisters of oak, stair-rods of brass, and busts and
settees on every landing, every such staircase is truly only an awful and naked
ladder running up into the Infinite to a deadly height. The millionaire who
stumps up inside the house is really doing the same thing as the tiler or
roof-mender who climbs up outside the house; they are both mounting up into the
void. They are both making an escalade of the intense inane. Each is a sort
of domestic mountaineer; he is reaching a point from which mere idle falling
will kill a man; and life is always worth living while men feel that they may
die.

I cannot understand people at present making such a fuss about flying ships and
aviation, when men ever since Stonehenge and the Pyramids have done something
so much more wild than flying. A grasshopper can go astonishingly high up in
the air, his biological limitation and weakness is that he cannot stop there. Hosts
of unclean birds and crapulous insects can pass through the sky, but they
cannot pass any communication between it and the earth. But the army of man has
advanced vertically into infinity, and not been cut off. It can establish
outposts in the ether, and yet keep open behind it its erect and insolent road.
It would be grand (as in Jules Verne) to fire a cannon-ball at the moon; but
would it not be grander to build a railway to the moon? Yet every building of
brick or wood is a hint of that high railroad; every chimney points to some
star, and every tower is a Tower of Babel. Man rising on these awful and
unbroken wings of stone seems to me more majestic and more mystic than man
fluttering for an instant on wings of canvas and sticks of steel. How sublime
and, indeed, almost dizzy is the thought of these veiled ladders on which we
all live, like climbing monkeys! Many a black-coated clerk in a flat may
comfort himself for his sombre garb by reflecting that he is like some lonely
rook in an immemorial elm. Many a wealthy bachelor on the top floor of a pile
of mansions should look forth at morning and try (if possible) to feel like an
eagle whose nest just clings to the edge of some awful cliff. How sad that the
word “giddy” is used to imply wantonness or levity! It should be a high
compliment to a man’s exalted spirituality and the imagination to say he is a
little giddy.

I strolled slowly back across the stretch of turf by the sunset, a field of the
cloth of gold. As I drew near my own house, its huge size began to horrify me;
and when I came to the porch of it I discovered with an incredulity as strong
as despair that my house was actually bigger than myself. A minute or two
before there might well have seemed to be a monstrous and mythical competition about
which of the two should swallow the other. But I was Jonah; my house was the
huge and hungry fish; and even as its jaws darkened and closed about me I had
again this dreadful fancy touching the dizzy altitude of all the works of man.
I climbed the stairs stubbornly, planting each foot with savage care, as if
ascending a glacier. When I got to a landing I was wildly relieved, and waved
my hat. The very word “landing” has about it the wild sound of some one washed up
by the sea. I climbed each flight like a ladder in naked sky. The walls all
round me failed and faded into infinity; I went up the ladder to my bedroom as
Montrose went up the ladder to the gallows; sic itur ad astra. Do you think
this is a little fantastic — even a little fearful and nervous? Believe me, it
is only one of the wild and wonderful things that one can learn by stopping at
home.

ROUGHLY speaking, there are three kinds of people in this world. The first kind
of people are People; they are the largest and probably the most valuable
class. We owe to this class the chairs we sit down on, the clothes we wear,
the houses we live in; and, indeed (when we come to think of it), we probably
belong to this class ourselves. The second class may be called for convenience
the Poets; they are often a nuisance to their families, but, generally
speaking, a blessing to mankind. The third class is that of the Professors or
Intellectuals; sometimes described as the thoughtful people; and these are a
blight and a desolation both to their families and also to mankind. Of course,
the classification sometimes overlaps, like all classification. Some good
people are almost poets and some bad poets are almost professors. But the
division follows lines of real psychological cleavage. I do not offer it
lightly. It has been the fruit of more than eighteen minutes of earnest reflection
and research.

The class called People (to which you and I, with no little pride, attach
ourselves) has certain casual, yet profound, assumptions, which are called “commonplaces,”
as that children are charming, or that twilight is sad and sentimental, or that
one man fighting three is a fine sight. Now, these feelings are not crude; they
are not even simple. The charm of children is very subtle; it is even complex,
to the extent of being almost contradictory. It is, at its very plainest,
mingled of a regard for hilarity and a regard for helplessness. The sentiment
of twilight, in the vulgarest drawing-room song or the coarsest pair of sweethearts,
is, so far as it goes, a subtle sentiment. It is strangely balanced between pain
and pleasure; it might also be called pleasure tempting pain. The plunge of
impatient chivalry by which we all admire a man fighting odds is not at all
easy to define separately, it means many things, pity, dramatic surprise, a
desire for justice, a delight in experiment and the indeterminate. The ideas
of the mob are really very subtle ideas; but the mob does not express them
subtly. In fact, it does not express them at all, except on those occasions (now
only too rare) when it indulges in insurrection and massacre.

Now, this accounts for the otherwise unreasonable fact of the existence of
Poets. Poets are those who share these popular sentiments, but can so express
them that they prove themselves the strange and delicate things that they
really are. Poets draw out the shy refinement of the rabble. Where the common
man covers the queerest emotions by saying, “Rum little kid,” Victor Hugo will
write “L’art d’être grand-père”; where the stockbroker will only say abruptly, “Evenings
closing in now,” Mr. Yeats will write “Into the twilight”; where the navvy can
only mutter something about pluck and being “precious game,” Homer will show
you the hero in rags in his own hall defying the princes at their banquet. The
Poets carry the popular sentiments to a keener and more splendid pitch; but let
it always be remembered that it is the popular sentiments that they are
carrying. No man ever wrote any good poetry to show that childhood was
shocking, or that twilight was gay and farcical, or that a man was contemptible
because he had crossed his single sword with three. The people who maintain
this are the Professors, or Prigs.

* * * * *

The Poets are those who rise above the people by understanding them. Of course,
most of the Poets wrote in prose — Rabelais, for instance, and Dickens. The
Prigs rise above the people by refusing to understand them: by saying that all
their dim, strange preferences are prejudices and superstitions. The Prigs make
the people feel stupid; the Poets make the people feel wiser than they could
have imagined that they were. There are many weird elements in this situation.
The oddest of all perhaps is the fate of the two factors in practical politics.
The Poets who embrace and admire the people are often pelted with stones and
crucified. The Prigs who despise the people are often loaded with lands and
crowned. In the House of Commons, for instance, there are quite a number of
prigs, but comparatively few poets. There are no People there at all.

By poets, as I have said, I do not mean people who write poetry, or indeed
people who write anything. I mean such people as, having culture and
imagination, use them to understand and share the feelings of their fellows; as
against those who use them to rise to what they call a higher plane. Crudely,
the poet differs from the mob by his sensibility; the professor differs from
the mob by his insensibility. He has not sufficient finesse and sensitiveness
to sympathise with the mob. His only notion is coarsely to contradict it, to
cut across it, in accordance with some egotistical plan of his own; to tell himself
that, whatever the ignorant say, they are probably wrong. He forgets that
ignorance often has the exquisite intuitions of innocence.

* * * * *

Let me take one example which may mark out the outline of the contention. Open
the nearest comic paper and let your eye rest lovingly upon a joke about a
mother-in-law. Now, the joke, as presented for the populace, will probably be a
simple joke; the old lady will be tall and stout, the hen-pecked husband will
be small and cowering. But for all that, a mother-in-law is not a simple idea. She
is a very subtle idea. The problem is not that she is big and arrogant; she is
frequently little and quite extraordinarily nice. The problem of the
mother-in-law is that she is like the twilight: half one thing and half
another. Now, this twilight truth, this fine and even tender embarrassment,
might be rendered, as it really is, by a poet, only here the poet would have to
be some very penetrating and sincere novelist, like George Meredith, or Mr. H.
G. Wells, whose “Ann Veronica” I have just been reading with delight. I would
trust the fine poets and novelists because they follow the fairy clue given
them in Comic Cuts. But suppose the Professor appears, and suppose he says
(as he almost certainly will), “A mother-in-law is merely a fellow-citizen. Considerations
of sex should not interfere with comradeship. Regard for age should not
influence the intellect. A mother-in-law is merely Another Mind. We should
free ourselves from these tribal hierarchies and degrees.” Now, when the
Professor says this (as he always does), I say to him, “Sir, you are coarser
than Comic Cuts. You are more vulgar and blundering than the most elephantine
music-hall artiste. You are blinder and grosser than the mob. These vulgar
knockabouts have, at least, got hold of a social shade and real mental
distinction, though they can only express it clumsily. You are so clumsy that
you cannot get hold of it at all. If you really cannot see that the bridegroom’s
mother and the bride have any reason for constraint or diffidence, then you are
neither polite nor humane: you have no sympathy in you for the deep and
doubtful hearts of human folk.” It is better even to put the difficulty as the
vulgar put it than to be pertly unconscious of the difficulty altogether.

The same question might be considered well enough in the old proverb that two
is company and three is none. This proverb is the truth put popularly: that
is, it is the truth put wrong. Certainly it is untrue that three is no
company. Three is splendid company: three is the ideal number for pure
comradeship: as in the Three Musketeers. But if you reject the proverb
altogether; if you say that two and three are the same sort of company; if you
cannot see that there is a wider abyss between two and three than between three
and three million — then I regret to inform you that you belong to the Third
Class of human beings; that you shall have no company either of two or three,
but shall be alone in a howling desert till you die.

THE other day on a stray spur of the Chiltern Hills I climbed up upon one of
those high, abrupt, windy churchyards from which the dead seem to look down
upon all the living. It was a mountain of ghosts as Olympus was a mountain of
gods. In that church lay the bones of great Puritan lords, of a time when most of
the power of England was Puritan, even of the Established Church. And below
these uplifted bones lay the huge and hollow valleys of the English
countryside, where the motors went by every now and then like meteors, where
stood out in white squares and oblongs in the chequered forest many of the
country seats even of those same families now dulled with wealth or decayed
with Toryism. And looking over that deep green prospect on that luminous yellow
evening, a lovely and austere thought came into my mind, a thought as beautiful
as the green wood and as grave as the tombs. The thought was this: that I
should like to go into Parliament, quarrel with my party, accept the
Stewardship of the Chiltern Hundreds, and then refuse to give it up.

We are so proud in England of our crazy constitutional anomalies that I fancy
that very few readers indeed will need to be told about the Steward of the
Chiltern Hundreds. But in case there should be here or there one happy man who
has never heard of such twisted tomfooleries, I will rapidly remind you what
this legal fiction is. As it is quite a voluntary, sometimes even an eager, affair
to get into Parliament, you would naturally suppose that it would be also a
voluntary matter to get out again. You would think your fellow-members would be
indifferent, or even relieved to see you go; especially as (by another exercise
of the shrewd, illogical old English common sense) they have carefully built
the room too small for the people who have to sit in it. But not so, my
pippins, as it says in the “Iliad.” If you are merely a member of Parliament
(Lord knows why) you can’t resign. But if you are a Minister of the Crown (Lord
knows why) you can. It is necessary to get into the Ministry in order to get
out of the House; and they have to give you some office that doesn’t exist or
that nobody else wants and thus unlock the door. So you go to the Prime
Minister, concealing your air of fatigue, and say, “It has been the ambition of
my life to be Steward of the Chiltern Hundreds.” The Prime Minister then
replies, “I can imagine no man more fitted both morally and mentally for that
high office.” He then gives it you, and you hurriedly leave, reflecting how the
republics of the Continent reel anarchically to and fro for lack of a little
solid English directness and simplicity.

* * * * *

Now, the thought that struck me like a thunderbolt as I sat on the Chiltern
slope was that I would like to get the Prime Minister to give me the Chiltern
Hundreds, and then startle and disturb him by showing the utmost interest in my
work. I should profess a general knowledge of my duties, but wish to be
instructed in the details. I should ask to see the Under-Steward and the
Under-Under-Steward, and all the fine staff of experienced permanent officials
who are the glory of this department. And, indeed, my enthusiasm would not be
wholly unreal. For as far as I can recollect the original duties of a Steward
of the Chiltern Hundreds were to put down the outlaws and brigands in that part
of the world. Well, there are a great many outlaws and brigands in that part
of the world still, and though their methods have so largely altered as to
require a corresponding alteration in the tactics of the Steward, I do not see
why an energetic and public-spirited Steward should not nab them yet.

For the robbers have not vanished from the old high forests to the west of the
great city. The thieves have not vanished; they have grown so large that they
are invisible. You do not see the word “Asia” written across a map of that
neighbourhood; nor do you see the word “Thief” written across the countrysides of
England; though it is really written in equally large letters. I know men
governing despotically great stretches of that country, whose every step in
life has been such that a slip would have sent them to Dartmoor; but they trod
along the high hard wall between right and wrong, the wall as sharp as a
sword-edge, as softly and craftily and lightly as a cat. The vastness of their
silent violence itself obscured what they were at; if they seem to stand for
the rights of property it is really because they have so often invaded them. And
if they do not break the laws, it is only because they make them.

* * * * *

But after all we only need a Steward of the Chiltern Hundreds who really
understands cats and thieves. Men hunt one animal differently from another;
and the rich could catch swindlers as dexterously as they catch otters or
antlered deer if they were really at all keen upon doing it. But then they
never have an uncle with antlers; nor a personal friend who is an otter. When
some of the great lords that lie in the churchyard behind me went out against
their foes in those deep woods beneath I wager that they had bows against the
bows of the outlaws, and spears against the spears of the robber knights. They
knew what they were about; they fought the evildoers of their age with the
weapons of their age. If the same common sense were applied to commercial law, in
forty-eight hours it would be all over with the American Trusts and the African
forward finance. But it will not be done: for the governing class either does
not care, or cares very much, for the criminals, and as for me, I had a
delusive opportunity of being Constable of Beaconsfield (with grossly
inadequate powers), but I fear I shall never really be Steward of the Chiltern
Hundreds.

IN my daily paper this morning I read the following interesting paragraphs,
which take my mind back to an England which I do not remember and which,
therefore (perhaps), I admire.

“Nearly sixty years ago — on 4 September, 1850 — the Austrian General Haynau, who
had gained an unenviable fame throughout the world by his ferocious methods in
suppressing the Hungarian revolution in 1849, while on a visit to this country,
was belaboured in the streets of London by the draymen of Messrs. Barclay,
Perkins and Co., whose brewery he had just inspected in company of an adjutant.
Popular delight was so great that the Government of the time did not dare to
prosecute the assailants, and the General — the ‘women-flogger,’ as he was
called by the people — had to leave these shores without remedy.

“He returned to his own country and settled upon his estate at Szekeres, which
is close to the commune above-mentioned. By his will the estate passed to his
daughter, after whose death it was to be presented to the commune. This
daughter has just died, but the Communal Council, after much deliberation, has
declined to accept the gift, and ordered that the estate should be left to fall
out of cultivation, and be called the ‘Bloody Meadow.’“

Now that is an example of how things happen under an honest democratical impulse.
I do not dwell specially on the earlier part of the story, though the earlier
part of the story is astonishingly interesting. It recalls the days when
Englishmen were potential lighters; that is, potential rebels. It is not for
lack of agonies of intellectual anger: the Sultan and the late King Leopold
have been denounced as heartily as General Haynau. But I doubt if they would
have been physically thrashed in the London streets.

It is not the tyrants that are lacking, but the draymen. Nevertheless, it is
not upon the historic heroes of Barclay, Perkins and Co., that I build all my
hope. Fine as it was, it was not a full and perfect revolution. A brewer’s
drayman beating an eminent European General with a stick, though a singularly
bright and pleasing vision, is not a complete one. Only when the brewer’s
drayman beats the brewer with a stick shall we see the clear and radiant sunrise
of British self-government. The fun will really start when we begin to thump the
oppressors of England as well as the oppressors of Hungary. It is, however, a
definite decline in the spiritual character of draymen that now they can thump
neither one nor the other.

* * * * *

But, as I have already suggested, my real quarrel is not about the first part
of the extract, but about the second. Whether or no the draymen of Barclay and
Perkins have degenerated, the Commune which includes Szekeres has not degenerated.
By the way, the Commune which includes Szekeres is called Kissekeres; I trust
that this frank avowal will excuse me from the necessity of mentioning either
of these places again by name. The Commune is still capable of performing
direct democratic actions, if necessary, with a stick.

I say with a stick, not with sticks, for that is the whole argument about
democracy. A people is a soul; and if you want to know what a soul is, I can
only answer that it is something that can sin and that can sacrifice itself. A
people can commit theft; a people can confess theft; a people can repent of
theft. That is the idea of the republic. Now, most modern people have got into
their heads the idea that democracies are dull, drifting things, a mere black
swarm or slide of clerks to their accustomed doom. In most modern novels and
essays it is insisted (by way of contrast) that a walking gentleman may have
adventures as he walks. It is insisted that an aristocrat can commit crimes,
because an aristocrat always cultivates liberty. But, in truth, a people can
have adventures, as Israel did crawling through the desert to the promised
land. A people can do heroic deeds; a people can commit crimes; the French
people did both in the Revolution; the Irish people have done both in their
much purer and more honourable progress.

But the real answer to this aristocratic argument which seeks to identify
democracy with a drab utilitarianism may be found in action such as that of the
Hungarian Commune — whose name I decline to repeat. This Commune did just one of
those acts that prove that a separate people has a separate personality; it
threw something away. A man can throw a bank note into the fire. A man can
fling a sack of corn into the river. The bank-note may be burnt as a
satisfaction of some scruple; the corn may be destroyed as a sacrifice to some
god. But whenever there is sacrifice we know there is a single will. Men may be
disputatious and doubtful, may divide by very narrow majorities in their debate
about how to gain wealth. But men have to be uncommonly unanimous in order to
refuse wealth. It wants a very complete committee to burn a bank note in the
office grate. It needs a highly religious tribe really to throw corn into the
river. This self-denial is the test and definition of self-government.

I wish I could feel certain that any English County Council or Parish Council
would be single enough to make that strong gesture of a romantic refusal; could
say, “No rents shall be raised from this spot; no grain shall grow in this
spot; no good shall come of this spot; it shall remain sterile for a sign.” But
I am afraid they might answer, like the eminent sociologist in the story, that
it was “wiste of spice.”

IT is an English misfortune that what is called “public spirit” is so often a
very private spirit; the legitimate but strictly individual ideals of this or
that person who happens to have the power to carry them out. When these
private principles are held by very rich people, the result is often the
blackest and most repulsive kind of despotism, which is benevolent despotism. Obviously
it is the public which ought to have public spirit. But in this country and at
this epoch this is exactly what it has not got. We shall have a public
washhouse and a public kitchen long before we have a public spirit; in fact, if
we had a public spirit we might very probably do without the other things. But
if England were properly and naturally governed by the English, one of the
first results would probably be this: that our standard of excess or defect in
property would be changed from that of the plutocrat to that of the moderately
needy man. That is, that while property might be strictly respected, everything
that is necessary to a clerk would be felt and considered on quite a different
plane from anything which is a very great luxury to a clerk. This sane
distinction of sentiment is not instinctive at present, because our standard of
life is that of the governing class, which is eternally turning luxuries into
necessities as fast as pork is turned into sausages; and which cannot remember
the beginning of its needs and cannot get to the end of its novelties.

Take, for the sake of argument, the case of the motor. Doubtless the duke now
feels it as necessary to have a motor as to have a roof, and in a little while
he may feel it equally necessary to have a flying ship. But this does not
prove (as the reactionary sceptics always argue) that a motor really is just as
necessary as a roof. It only proves that a man can get used to an artificial
life: it does not prove that there is no natural life for him to get used to. In
the broad bird’s-eye view of common sense there abides a huge disproportion
between the need for a roof and the need for an aeroplane; and no rush of
inventions can ever alter it. The only difference is that things are now judged
by the abnormal needs, when they might be judged merely by the normal needs. The
best aristocrat sees the situation from an aeroplane. The good citizen, in his
loftiest moments, goes no further than seeing it from the roof.

It is not true that luxury is merely relative. It is not true that it is only
an expensive novelty which we may afterwards come to think a necessity. Luxury
has a firm philosophical meaning; and where there is a real public spirit
luxury is generally allowed for, sometimes rebuked, but always recognised
instantly. To the healthy soul there is something in the very nature of certain
pleasures which warns us that they are exceptions, and that if they become
rules they will become very tyrannical rules.

Take a harassed seamstress out of the Harrow Road and give her one lightning
hour in a motor-car, and she will probably feel it as splendid, but strange,
rare, and even terrible. But this is not (as the relativists say) merely
because she has never been in a car before. She has never been in the middle of
a Somerset cowslip meadow before; but if you put her there she does not think
it terrifying or extraordinary, but merely pleasant and free and a little
lonely. She does not think the motor monstrous because it is new. She thinks it
monstrous because she has eyes in her head; she thinks it monstrous because it
is monstrous. That is, her mothers and grandmothers, and the whole race by
whose life she lives, have had, as a matter of fact, a roughly recognisable
mode of living; sitting in a green field was a part of it; travelling as quick
as a cannon ball was not. And we should not look down on the seamstress because
she mechanically emits a short sharp scream whenever the motor begins to move. On
the contrary, we ought to look up to the seamstress, and regard her cry as a
kind of mystic omen or revelation of nature, as the old Goths used to consider
the howls emitted by chance females when annoyed. For that ritual yell is
really a mark of moral health — of swift response to the stimulations and
changes of life. The seamstress is wiser than all the learned ladies,
precisely because she can still feel that a motor is a different sort of thing
from a meadow. By the accident of her economic imprisonment it is even possible
that she may have seen more of the former than the latter. But this has not
shaken her cyclopean sagacity as to which is the natural thing and which the
artificial. If not for her, at least for humanity as a whole, there is little
doubt about which is the more normally attainable. It is considerably cheaper to
sit in a meadow and see motors go by than to sit in a motor and see meadows go
by.

* * * * *

To me personally, at least, it would never seem needful to own a motor, any
more than to own an avalanche. An avalanche, if you have luck, I am told, is a
very swift, successful, and thrilling way of coming down a hill. It is
distinctly more stirring, say, than a glacier, which moves an inch in a hundred
years. But I do not divide these pleasures either by excitement or
convenience, but by the nature of the thing itself. It seems human to have a
horse or bicycle, because it seems human to potter about; and men cannot work
horses, nor can bicycles work men, enormously far afield of their ordinary haunts
and affairs.

But about motoring there is something magical, like going to the moon; and I
say the thing should be kept exceptional and felt as something breathless and
bizarre. My ideal hero would own his horse, but would have the moral courage
to hire his motor. Fairy tales are the only sound guidebooks to life; I like
the Fairy Prince to ride on a white pony out of his father’s stables, which are
of ivory and gold. But if in the course of his adventures he finds it
necessary to travel on a flaming dragon, I think he ought to give the dragon
back to the witch at the end of the story. It is a mistake to have dragons
about the place.

* * * * *

For there is truly an air of something weird about luxury; and it is by this
that healthy human nature has always smelt and suspected it. All romances that
deal in extreme luxury, from the “Arabian Nights” to the novels of Ouida and
Disraeli, have, it may be noted, a singular air of dream and occasionally of
nightmare. In such imaginative debauches there is something as occasional as
intoxication; if that is still counted occasional. Life in those preposterous
palaces would be an agony of dullness; it is clear we are meant to visit them
only as in a flying vision. And what is true of the old freaks of wealth,
flavour and fierce colour and smell, I would say also of the new freak of
wealth, which is speed. I should say to the duke, when I entered his house at
the head of an armed mob, “I do not object to your having exceptional
pleasures, if you have them exceptionally. I do not mind your enjoying the
strange and alien energies of science, if you feel them strange and alien, and
not your own. But in condemning you (under the Seventeenth Section of the
Eighth Decree of the Republic) to hire a motor-car twice a year at Margate, I
am not the enemy of your luxuries, but, rather, the protector of them.”

That is what I should say to the duke. As to what the duke would say to me,
that is another matter, and may well be deferred.

DOUBTLESS the unsympathetic might state my doctrine that one should not own a
motor like a horse, but rather use it like a flying dragon in the simpler form
that I will always go motoring in somebody else’s car. My favourite modern
philosopher (Mr. W. W. Jacobs) describes a similar case of spiritual delicacy
misunderstood. I have not the book at hand, but I think that Job Brown was
reproaching Bill Chambers for wasteful drunkenness, and Henery Walker spoke up for
Bill, and said he scarcely ever had a glass but what somebody else paid for it,
and there was “unpleasantness all round then.”

Being less sensitive than Bill Chambers (or whoever it was) I will risk this
rude perversion of my meaning, and concede that I was in a motor-car yesterday,
and the motor-car most certainly was not my own, and the journey, though it
contained nothing that is specially unusual on such journeys, had running
through it a strain of the grotesque which was at once wholesome and
humiliating. The symbol of that influence was that ancient symbol of the humble
and humorous — a donkey.

* * * * *

When first I saw the donkey I saw him in the sunlight as the unearthly gargoyle
that he is. My friend had met me in his car (I repeat firmly, in his car) at
the little painted station in the middle of the warm wet woods and hop-fields
of that western country. He proposed to drive me first to his house beyond the
village before starting for a longer spin of adventure, and we rattled through
those rich green lanes which have in them something singularly analogous to
fairy tales; whether the lanes produced the fairies or (as I believe) the
fairies produced the lanes. All around in the glimmering hop-yards stood those
little hop-kilns like stunted and slanting spires. They look like dwarfish
churches — in fact, rather like many modern churches I could mention, churches
all of them small and each of them a little crooked. In this elfin atmosphere
we swung round a sharp corner and half-way up a steep, white hill, and saw what
looked at first like a tall, black monster against the sun. It appeared to be
a dark and dreadful woman walking on wheels and waving long ears like a bat’s.
A second glance told me that she was not the local witch in a state of
transition; she was only one of the million tricks of perspective. She stood up
in a small wheeled cart drawn by a donkey; the donkey’s ears were just behind
her head, and the whole was black against the light.

Perspective is really the comic element in everything. It has a pompous Latin
name, but it is incurably Gothic and grotesque. One simple proof of this is
that it is always left out of all dignified and decorative art. There is no
perspective in the Elgin Marbles, and even the essentially angular angels in
mediaeval stained glass almost always (as it says in “Patience”) contrive to
look both angular and flat. There is something intrinsically disproportionate and
outrageous in the idea of the distant objects dwindling and growing dwarfish,
the closer objects swelling enormous and intolerable. There is something
frantic in the notion that one’s own father by walking a little way can be
changed by a blast of magic to a pigmy. There is something farcical in the
fancy that Nature keeps one’s uncle in an infinite number of sizes, according
to where he is to stand. All soldiers in retreat turn into tin soldiers; all
bears in rout into toy bears; as if on the ultimate horizon of the world
everything was sardonically doomed to stand up laughable and little against
heaven.

* * * * *

It was for this reason that the old woman and her donkey struck us first when
seen from behind as one black grotesque. I afterwards had the chance of seeing
the old woman, the cart, and the donkey fairly, in flank and in all their
length. I saw the old woman and the donkey passant, as they might have appeared
heraldically on the shield of some heroic family. I saw the old woman and the
donkey dignified, decorative, and flat, as they might have marched across the
Elgin Marbles. Seen thus under an equal light, there was nothing specially
ugly about them; the cart was long and sufficiently comfortable; the donkey was
stolid and sufficiently respectable; the old woman was lean but sufficiently
strong, and even smiling in a sour, rustic manner. But seen from behind they
looked like one black monstrous animal; the dark donkey ears seemed like
dreadful wings, and the tall dark back of the woman, erect like a tree, seemed
to grow taller and taller until one could almost scream.

Then we went by her with a blasting roar like a railway train, and fled far
from her over the brow of the hill to my friend’s home.

There we paused only for my friend to stock the car with some kind of picnic
paraphernalia, and so started again, as it happened, by the way we had come.
Thus it fell that we went shattering down that short, sharp hill again before
the poor old woman and her donkey had managed to crawl to the top of it; and
seeing them under a different light, I saw them very differently. Black
against the sun, they had seemed comic; but bright against greenwood and grey
cloud, they were not comic but tragic; for there are not a few things that seem
fantastic in the twilight, and in the sunlight are sad. I saw that she had a
grand, gaunt mask of ancient honour and endurance, and wide eyes sharpened to
two shining points, as if looking for that small hope on the horizon of human
life. I also saw that her cart contained carrots.

“Don’t you feel, broadly speaking, a beast,” I asked my friend, “when you go so
easily and so fast?” For we had crashed by so that the crazy cart must have
thrilled in every stick of it.

My friend was a good man, and said, “Yes. But I don’t think it would do her any
good if I went slower.”

“No,” I assented after reflection. “Perhaps the only pleasure we can give to
her or any one else is to get out of their sight very soon.”

My friend availed himself of this advice in no niggard spirit; I felt as if we
were fleeing for our lives in throttling fear after some frightful atrocity.
In truth, there is only one difference left between the secrecy of the two
social classes: the poor hide themselves in darkness and the rich hide
themselves in distance. They both hide.

* * * * *

As we shot like a lost boat over a cataract down into a whirlpool of white
roads far below, I saw afar a black dot crawling like an insect. I looked
again: I could hardly believe it. There was the slow old woman, with her slow
old donkey, still toiling along the main road. I asked my friend to slacken,
but when he said of the car, “She’s wanting to go,” I knew it was all up with
him. For when you have called a thing female you have yielded to it utterly. We
passed the old woman with a shock that must have shaken the earth: if her head
did not reel and her heart quail, I know not what they were made of. And when
we had fled perilously on in the gathering dark, spurning hamlets behind us, I
suddenly called out, “Why, what asses we are! Why, it’s She that is brave — she
and the donkey. We are safe enough; we are artillery and plate-armour: and she
stands up to us with matchwood and a snail! If you had grown old in a quiet
valley, and people began firing cannon-balls as big as cabs at you in your seventieth
year, wouldn’t you jump — and she never moved an eyelid. Oh! we go very fast and
very far, no doubt — ”

As I spoke came a curious noise, and my friend, instead of going fast, began to
go very slow; then he stopped; then he got out. Then he said, “And I left the
Stepney behind.”

The grey moths came out of the wood and the yellow stars came out to crown it,
as my friend, with the lucidity of despair, explained to me (on the soundest
scientific principles, of course) that nothing would be any good at all. We
must sleep the night in the lane, except in the very unlikely event of some one
coming by to carry a message to some town. Twice I thought I heard some tiny
sound of such approach, and it died away like wind in the trees, and the
motorist was already asleep when I heard it renewed and realised Something
certainly was approaching. I ran up the road — and there it was. Yes, It — and
She. Thrice had she come, once comic and once tragic and once heroic. And when
she came again it was as if in pardon on a pure errand of prosaic pity and
relief. I am quite serious. I do not want you to laugh. It is not the first
time a donkey has been received seriously, nor one riding a donkey with
respect.

IN a quiet and rustic though fairly famous church in my neighbourhood there is
a window supposed to represent an Angel on a Bicycle. It does definitely and
indisputably represent a nude youth sitting on a wheel; but there is enough
complication in the wheel and sanctity (I suppose) in the youth to warrant this
working description. It is a thing of florid Renascence outline, and belongs to
the highly pagan period which introduced all sorts of objects into ornament: personally
I can believe in the bicycle more than in the angel. Men, they say, are now
imitating angels; in their flying-machines, that is: not in any other respect
that I have heard of. So perhaps the angel on the bicycle (if he is an angel
and if it is a bicycle) was avenging himself by imitating man. If so, he
showed that high order of intellect which is attributed to angels in the mediaeval
books, though not always (perhaps) in the mediaeval pictures.

For wheels are the mark of a man quite as much as wings are the mark of an
angel. Wheels are the things that are as old as mankind and yet are strictly
peculiar to man, that are prehistoric but not pre-human.

A distinguished psychologist, who is well acquainted with physiology, has told
me that parts of himself are certainly levers, while other parts are probably
pulleys, but that after feeling himself carefully all over, he cannot find a
wheel anywhere. The wheel, as a mode of movement, is a purely human thing. On
the ancient escutcheon of Adam (which, like much of the rest of his costume,
has not yet been discovered) the heraldic emblem was a wheel — passant. As a
mode of progress, I say, it is unique. Many modern philosophers, like my friend
before mentioned, are ready to find links between man and beast, and to show
that man has been in all things the blind slave of his mother earth. Some, of a
very different kind, are even eager to show it; especially if it can be twisted
to the discredit of religion. But even the most eager scientists have often
admitted in my hearing that they would be surprised if some kind of cow
approached them moving solemnly on four wheels. Wings, fins, flappers, claws, hoofs,
webs, trotters, with all these the fantastic families of the earth come against
us and close around us, fluttering and flapping and rustling and galloping and
lumbering and thundering; but there is no sound of wheels.

I remember dimly, if, indeed, I remember aright, that in some of those dark
prophetic pages of Scripture, that seem of cloudy purple and dusky gold, there
is a passage in which the seer beholds a violent dream of wheels. Perhaps this
was indeed the symbolic declaration of the spiritual supremacy of man.
Whatever the birds may do above or the fishes beneath his ship, man is the only
thing to steer; the only thing to be conceived as steering. He may make the
birds his friends, if he can. He may make the fishes his gods, if he chooses. But
most certainly he will not believe a bird at the masthead; and it is hardly
likely that he will even permit a fish at the helm. He is, as Swinburne says,
helmsman and chief: he is literally the Man at the Wheel.

The wheel is an animal that is always standing on its head; only “it does it so
rapidly that no philosopher has ever found out which is its head.” Or if the
phrase be felt as more exact, it is an animal that is always turning head over
heels and progressing by this principle. Some fish, I think, turn head over
heels (supposing them, for the sake of argument, to have heels); I have a dog
who nearly did it; and I did it once myself when I was very small. It was an
accident, and, as delightful novelist, Mr. De Morgan, would say, it never can
happen again. Since then no one has accused me of being upside down except
mentally: and I rather think that there is something to be said for that; especially
as typified by the rotary symbol. A wheel is the sublime paradox; one part of
it is always going forward and the other part always going back. Now this, as
it happens, is highly similar to the proper condition of any human soul or any
political state. Every sane soul or state looks at once backwards and forwards;
and even goes backwards to come on.

For those interested in revolt (as I am) I only say meekly that one cannot have
a Revolution without revolving. The wheel, being a logical thing, has
reference to what is behind as well as what is before. It has (as every
society should have) a part that perpetually leaps helplessly at the sky and a
part that perpetually bows down its head into the dust. Why should people be so
scornful of us who stand on our heads? Bowing down one’s head in the dust is a
very good thing, the humble beginning of all happiness. When we have bowed our
heads in the dust for a little time the happiness comes; and then (leaving our
heads in the humble and reverent position) we kick up our heels behind in the
air. That is the true origin of standing on one’s head; and the ultimate
defence of paradox. The wheel humbles itself to be exalted; only it does it a
little quicker than I do.

LIFE is full of a ceaseless shower of small coincidences; too small to be worth
mentioning except for a special purpose, often too trifling even to be noticed,
any more than we notice one snowflake falling on another. It is this that
lends a frightful plausibility to all false doctrines and evil fads. There are
always such crowds of accidental arguments for anything. If I said suddenly
that historical truth is generally told by red-haired men, I have no doubt that
ten minutes’ reflection (in which I decline to indulge) would provide me with a
handsome list of instances in support of it. I remember a riotous argument about
Bacon and Shakespeare in which I offered quite at random to show that Lord
Rosebery had written the works of Mr. W. B. Yeats. No sooner had I said the
words than a torrent of coincidences rushed upon my mind. I pointed out, for
instance, that Mr. Yeats’s chief work was “The Secret Rose.” This may easily
be paraphrased as “The Quiet or Modest Rose”; and so, of course, as the
Primrose. A second after I saw the same suggestion in the combination of “rose”
and “bury.” If I had pursued the matter, who knows but I might have been a
raving maniac by this time.

We trip over these trivial repetitions and exactitudes at every turn, only they
are too trivial even for conversation. A man named Williams did walk into a
strange house and murder a man named Williamson; it sounds like a sort of
infanticide. A journalist of my acquaintance did move quite unconsciously from
a place called Overstrand to a place called Overroads. When he had made this
escape he was very properly pursued by a voting card from Battersea, on which a
political agent named Burn asked him to vote for a political candidate named
Burns. And when he did so another coincidence happened to him: rather a
spiritual than a material coincidence; a mystical thing, a matter of a magic
number.

* * * * *

For a sufficient number of reasons, the man I know went up to vote in Battersea
in a drifting and even dubious frame of mind. As the train slid through swampy
woods and sullen skies there came into his empty mind those idle and yet awful
questions which come when the mind is empty. Fools make cosmic systems out of
them; knaves make profane poems out of them; men try to crush them like an ugly
lust. Religion is only the responsible reinforcement of common courage and
common sense. Religion only sets up the normal mood of health against the
hundred moods of disease.

But there is this about such ghastly empty enigmas, that they always have an
answer to the obvious answer, the reply offered by daily reason. Suppose a man’s
children have gone swimming; suppose he is suddenly throttled by the senseless
fear that they are drowned. The obvious answer is, “Only one man in a thousand
has his children drowned.” But a deeper voice (deeper, being as deep as hell)
answers, “And why should not you be the thousandth man?” What is true of tragic
doubt is true also of trivial doubt. The voter’s guardian devil said to him, “If
you don’t vote to-day you can do fifteen things which will quite certainly do some
good somewhere, please a friend, please a child, please a maddened publisher.
And what good do you expect to do by voting? You don’t think your man will get
in by one vote, do you?” To this he knew the answer of common sense, “But if
everybody said that, nobody would get in at all.” And then there came that
deeper voice from Hades, “But you are not settling what everybody shall do, but
what one person on one occasion shall do. If this afternoon you went your way
about more solid things, how would it matter and who would ever know?” Yet
somehow the voter drove on blindly through the blackening London roads, and
found somewhere a tedious polling station and recorded his tiny vote.

The politician for whom the voter had voted got in by five hundred and
fifty-five votes. The voter read this next morning at breakfast, being in a
more cheery and expansive mood, and found something very fascinating not merely
in the fact of the majority, but even in the form of it. There was something
symbolic about the three exact figures; one felt it might be a sort of motto or
cipher. In the great book of seals and cloudy symbols there is just such a
thundering repetition. Six hundred and sixty-six was the Mark of the Beast.
Five hundred and fifty-five is the Mark of the Man; the triumphant tribune and
citizen. A number so symmetrical as that really rises out of the region of
science into the region of art. It is a pattern, like the egg-and-dart ornament
or the Greek key. One might edge a wall-paper or fringe a robe with a recurring
decimal. And while the voter luxuriated in this light exactitude of the
numbers, a thought crossed his mind and he almost leapt to his feet. “Why, good
heavens!” he cried. “I won that election; and it was won by one vote! But for
me it would have been the despicable, broken-backed, disjointed, inharmonious
figure five hundred and fifty-four. The whole artistic point would have
vanished. The Mark of the Man would have disappeared from history. It was I who
with a masterful hand seized the chisel and carved the hieroglyph — complete
and perfect. I clutched the trembling hand of Destiny when it was about to
make a dull square four and forced it to make a nice curly five. Why, but for
me the Cosmos would have lost a coincidence!” After this outburst the voter sat
down and finished his breakfast.

PERHAPS you do not know where Ethandune is. Nor do I; nor does anybody. That
is where the somewhat sombre fun begins. I cannot even tell you for certain
whether it is the name of a forest or a town or a hill. I can only say that in
any case it is of the kind that floats and is unfixed. If it is a forest, it
is one of those forests that march with a million legs, like the walking trees
that were the doom of Macbeth. If it is a town, it is one of those towns that
vanish, like a city of tents. If it is a hill, it is a flying hill, like the
mountain to which faith lends wings. Over a vast dim region of England this
dark name of Ethandune floats like an eagle doubtful where to swoop and strike,
and, indeed, there were birds of prey enough over Ethandune, wherever it was. But
now Ethandune itself has grown as dark and drifting as the black drifts of the
birds.

And yet without this word that you cannot fit with a meaning and hardly with a
memory, you would be sitting in a very different chair at this moment and
looking at a very different tablecloth. As a practical modern phrase I do not
commend it; if my private critics and correspondents in whom I delight should
happen to address me “G. K. Chesterton, Poste Restante, Ethandune,” I fear their
letters would not come to hand. If two hurried commercial travellers should
agree to discuss a business matter at Ethandune from 5 to 5.15, I am afraid
they would grow old in the district as white-haired wanderers. To put it
plainly, Ethandune is anywhere and nowhere in the western hills; it is an
English mirage. And yet but for this doubtful thing you would have probably no
Daily News on Saturday and certainly no church on Sunday. I do not say that
either of these two things is a benefit; but I do say that they are customs,
and that you would not possess them except through this mystery. You would not
have Christmas puddings, nor (probably) any puddings; you would not have Easter
eggs, probably not poached eggs, I strongly suspect not scrambled eggs, and the
best historians are decidedly doubtful about curried eggs. To cut a long story
short (the longest of all stories), you would not have any civilisation, far
less any Christian civilisation. And if in some moment of gentle curiosity you
wish to know why you are the polished sparkling, rounded, and wholly
satisfactory citizen which you obviously are, then I can give you no more
definite answer geographical or historical; but only toll in your ears the tone
of the uncaptured name — Ethandune.

I will try to state quite sensibly why it is as important as it is. And yet
even that is not easy. If I were to state the mere fact from the history
books, numbers of people would think it equally trivial and remote, like some
war of the Picts and Scots. The points perhaps might be put in this way. There
is a certain spirit in the world which breaks everything off short. There may
be magnificence in the smashing; but the thing is smashed. There may be a
certain splendour; but the splendour is sterile: it abolishes all future
splendours. I mean (to take a working example), York Minster covered with
flames might happen to be quite as beautiful as York Minster covered with
carvings. But the carvings produce more carvings. The flames produce nothing
but a little black heap. When any act has this cul-de-sac quality it matters
little whether it is done by a book or a sword, by a clumsy battle-axe or a
chemical bomb. The case is the same with ideas. The pessimist may be a proud
figure when he curses all the stars; the optimist may be an even prouder figure
when he blesses them all. But the real test is not in the energy, but in the
effect. When the optimist has said, “All things are interesting,” we are left
free; we can be interested as much or as little as we please. But when the
pessimist says, “No things are interesting,” it may be a very witty remark: but it is the last witty remark that can be made on the subject. He has burnt
his cathedral; he has had his blaze and the rest is ashes. The sceptics, like
bees, give their one sting and die. The pessimist must be wrong, because he
says the last word.

Now, this spirit that denies and that destroys had at one period of history a
dreadful epoch of military superiority. They did burn York Minster, or at
least, places of the same kind. Roughly speaking, from the seventh century to
the tenth, a dense tide of darkness, of chaos and brainless cruelty, poured on
these islands and on the western coasts of the Continent, which well-nigh cut
them off from all the white man’s culture for ever. And this is the final human
test; that the varied chiefs of that vague age were remembered or forgotten
according to how they had resisted this almost cosmic raid. Nobody thought of
the modern nonsense about races; everybody thought of the human race and its
highest achievements. Arthur was a Celt, and may have been a fabulous Celt;
but he was a fable on the right side. Charlemagne may have been a Gaul or a
Goth, but he was not a barbarian; he fought for the tradition against the
barbarians, the nihilists. And for this reason also, for this reason, in the
last resort, only, we call the saddest and in some ways the least successful of
the Wessex kings by the title of Alfred the Great. Alfred was defeated by the
barbarians again and again, he defeated the barbarians again and again; but his
victories were almost as vain as his defeats. Fortunately he did not believe in
the Time Spirit or the Trend of Things or any such modern rubbish, and
therefore kept pegging away. But while his failures and his fruitless successes
have names still in use (such as Wilton, Basing, and Ashdown), that last epic
battle which really broke the barbarian has remained without a modern place or
name. Except that it was near Chippenham, where the Danes gave up their swords
and were baptised, no one can pick out certainly the place where you and I were
saved from being savages for ever.

But the other day under a wild sunset and moonrise I passed the place which is
best reputed as Ethandune, a high, grim upland, partly bare and partly shaggy;
like that savage and sacred spot in those great imaginative lines about the
demon lover and the waning moon. The darkness, the red wreck of sunset, the
yellow and lurid moon, the long fantastic shadows, actually created that sense
of monstrous incident which is the dramatic side of landscape. The bare grey
slopes seemed to rush downhill like routed hosts; the dark clouds drove across
like riven banners; and the moon was like a golden dragon, like the Golden
Dragon of Wessex.

As we crossed a tilt of the torn heath I saw suddenly between myself and the
moon a black shapeless pile higher than a house. The atmosphere was so intense
that I really thought of a pile of dead Danes, with some phantom conqueror on
the top of it. Fortunately I was crossing these wastes with a friend who knew more
history than I; and he told me that this was a barrow older than Alfred, older
than the Romans, older perhaps than the Britons; and no man knew whether it was
a wall or a trophy or a tomb. Ethandune is still a drifting name; but it gave
me a queer emotion to think that, sword in hand, as the Danes poured with the
torrents of their blood down to Chippenham, the great king may have lifted up his
head and looked at that oppressive shape, suggestive of something and yet
suggestive of nothing; may have looked at it as we did, and understood it as
little as we.

SOME time ago a Sub-Tropical Dinner was given by some South African
millionaire. I forget his name; and so, very likely, does he. The humour of
this was so subtle and haunting that it has been imitated by another
millionaire, who has given a North Pole Dinner in a grand hotel, on which he
managed to spend gigantic sums of money. I do not know how he did it; perhaps
they had silver for snow and great sapphires for lumps of ice. Anyhow, it
seems to have cost rather more to bring the Pole to London than to take Peary to
the Pole. All this, one would say, does not concern us. We do not want to go
to the Pole — or to the hotel. I, for one, cannot imagine which would be the
more dreary and disgusting — the real North Pole or the sham one. But as a
mere matter of psychology (that merry pastime) there is a question that is not
unentertaining.

Why is it that all this scheme of ice and snow leaves us cold? Why is it that
you and I feel that we would (on the whole) rather spend the evening with two
or three stable boys in a pot-house than take part in that pallid and Arctic
joke? Why does the modern millionaire’s jest bore a man to death with the mere
thought of it? That it does bore a man to death I take for granted, and shall
do so until somebody writes to me in cold ink and tells me that he really thinks
it funny.

* * * * *

Now, it is not a sufficient explanation to say that the joke is silly. All
jokes are silly; that is what they are for. If you ask some sincere and
elemental person, a woman, for instance, what she thinks of a good sentence
from Dickens, she will say that it is “too silly.” When Mr. Weller, senior,
assured Mr. Weller, junior, that “circumvented” was “a more tenderer word” than
“circumscribed,” the remark was at least as silly as it was sublime. It is
vain, then, to object to “senseless jokes.” The very definition of a joke is
that it need have no sense; except that one wild and supernatural sense which
we call the sense of humour. Humour is meant, in a literal sense, to make game
of man; that is, to dethrone him from his official dignity and hunt him like
game. It is meant to remind us human beings that we have things about us as
ungainly and ludicrous as the nose of the elephant or the neck of the giraffe.
If laughter does not touch a sort of fundamental folly, it does not do its duty
in bringing us back to an enormous and original simplicity. Nothing has been
worse than the modern notion that a clever man can make a joke without taking
part in it; without sharing in the general absurdity that such a situation
creates. It is unpardonable conceit not to laugh at your own jokes. Joking is
undignified; that is why it is so good for one’s soul. Do not fancy you can be
a detached wit and avoid being a buffoon; you cannot. If you are the Court
Jester you must be the Court Fool.

Whatever it is, therefore, that wearies us in these wealthy jokes (like the
North Pole Dinner) it is not merely that men make fools of themselves. When
Dickens described Mr. Chuckster, Dickens was, strictly speaking, making a fool
of himself; for he was making a fool out of himself. And every kind of real
lark, from acting a charade to making a pun, does consist in restraining one’s
nine hundred and ninety-nine serious selves and letting the fool loose. The
dullness of the millionaire joke is much deeper. It is not silly at all; it is
solely stupid. It does not consist of ingenuity limited, but merely of inanity
expanded. There is considerable difference between a wit making a fool of
himself and a fool making a wit of himself.

* * * * *

The true explanation, I fancy, may be stated thus. We can all remember it in
the case of the really inspiriting parties and fooleries of our youth. The only
real fun is to have limited materials and a good idea. This explains the
perennial popularity of impromptu private theatricals. These fascinate because
they give such a scope for invention and variety with the most domestic
restriction of machinery. A tea-cosy may have to do for an Admiral’s cocked
hat; it all depends on whether the amateur actor can swear like an Admiral. A
hearth-rug may have to do for a bear’s fur; it all depends on whether the
wearer is a polished and versatile man of the world and can grunt like a bear. A
clergyman’s hat (to my own private and certain knowledge) can be punched and
thumped into the exact shape of a policeman’s helmet; it all depends on the
clergyman. I mean it depends on his permission; his imprimatur; his nihil
obstat. Clergymen can be policemen; rugs can rage like wild animals;
tea-cosies can smell of the sea; if only there is at the back of them all one
bright and amusing idea. What is really funny about Christmas charades in any
average home is that there is a contrast between commonplace resources and one
comic idea. What is deadly dull about the millionaire-banquets is that there is
a contrast between colossal resources and no idea.

* * * * *

That is the abyss of inanity in such feasts — it may be literally called a
yawning abyss. The abyss is the vast chasm between the money power employed
and the thing it is employed on. To make a big joke out of a broomstick, a
barrow and an old hat — that is great. But to make a small joke out of
mountains of emeralds and tons of gold — surely that is humiliating! The North
Pole is not a very good joke to start with. An icicle hanging on one’s nose is
a simple sort of humour in any case. If a set of spontaneous mummers got the
effect cleverly with cut crystals from the early Victorian chandelier there
might really be something suddenly funny in it. But what should we say of
hanging diamonds on a hundred human noses merely to make that precious joke
about icicles?

What can be more abject than the union of elaborate and recherché arrangements
with an old and obvious point? The clown with the red-hot poker and the string
of sausages is all very well in his way. But think of a string of pâté de foie
gras sausages at a guinea a piece! Think of a red-hot poker cut out of a
single ruby! Imagine such fantasticalities of expense with such a tameness and
staleness of design.

We may even admit the practical joke if it is domestic and simple. We may
concede that apple-pie beds and butter-slides are sometimes useful things for
the education of pompous persons living the Higher Life. But imagine a man
making a butter-slide and telling everybody it was made with the most expensive
butter. Picture an apple-pie bed of purple and cloth of gold. It is not hard to
see that such schemes would lead simultaneously to a double boredom; weariness
of the costly and complex method and of the meagre and trivial thought. This
is the true analysis, I think of that chill of tedium that strikes to the soul
of any intelligent man when he hears of such elephantine pranks. That is why we
feel that Freak Dinners would not even be freakish. That is why we feel that
expensive Arctic feasts would probably be a frost.

* * * * *

If it be said that such things do no harm, I hasten, in one sense, at least, to
agree. Far from it; they do good. They do good in the most vital matter of
modern times; for they prove and print in huge letters the truth which our
society must learn or perish. They prove that wealth in society as now
constituted does not tend to get into the hands of the thrifty or the capable, but
actually tends to get into the hands of wastrels and imbeciles. And it proves
that the wealthy class of to-day is quite as ignorant about how to enjoy itself
as about how to rule other people. That it cannot make its government govern or
its education educate we may take as a trifling weakness of oligarchy; but
pleasure we do look to see in such a class; and it has surely come to its
decrepitude when it cannot make its pleasures please.

ONE sometimes hears from persons of the chillier type of culture the remark
that plain country people do not appreciate the beauty of the country. This is
an error rooted in the intellectual pride of mediocrity; and is one of the many
examples of a truth in the idea that extremes meet. Thus, to appreciate the
virtues of the mob one must either be on a level with it (as I am) or be really
high up, like the saints. It is roughly the same with aesthetics; slang and
rude dialect can be relished by a really literary taste, but not by a merely
bookish taste. And when these cultivated cranks say that rustics do not talk
of Nature in an appreciative way, they really mean that they do not talk in a
bookish way. They do not talk bookishly about clouds or stones, or pigs or
slugs, or horses or anything you please. They talk piggishly about pigs; and
sluggishly, I suppose, about slugs; and are refreshingly horsy about horses.
They speak in a stony way of stones; they speak in a cloudy way of clouds; and
this is surely the right way. And if by any chance a simple intelligent person
from the country comes in contact with any aspect of Nature unfamiliar and
arresting, such a person’s comment is always worth remark. It is sometimes an
epigram, and at worst it is never a quotation.

Consider, for instance, what wastes of wordy imitation and ambiguity the
ordinary educated person in the big towns could pour out on the subject of the
sea. A country girl I know in the county of Buckingham had never seen the sea
in her life until the other day. When she was asked what she thought of it she
said it was like cauliflowers. Now that is a piece of pure literature — vivid,
entirely independent and original, and perfectly true. I had always been
haunted with an analogous kinship which I could never locate; cabbages always remind
me of the sea and the sea always reminds me of cabbages. It is partly, perhaps,
the veined mingling of violet and green, as in the sea a purple that is almost
dark red may mix with a green that is almost yellow, and still be the blue sea
as a whole. But it is more the grand curves of the cabbage that curl over cavernously
like waves, and it is partly again that dreamy repetition, as of a pattern,
that made two great poets, Aeschylus and Shakespeare, use a word like “multitudinous”
of the ocean. But just where my fancy halted the Buckinghamshire young woman
rushed (so to speak) to my imaginative rescue. Cauliflowers are twenty times
better than cabbages, for they show the wave breaking as well as curling, and
the efflorescence of the branching foam, blind bubbling, and opaque. Moreover,
the strong lines of life are suggested; the arches of the rushing waves have
all the rigid energy of green stalks, as if the whole sea were one great green
plant with one immense white flower rooted in the abyss.

Now, a large number of delicate and superior persons would refuse to see the
force in that kitchen garden comparison, because it is not connected with any
of the ordinary maritime sentiments as stated in books and songs. The
aesthetic amateur would say that he knew what large and philosophical thoughts
he ought to have by the boundless deep. He would say that he was not a
greengrocer who would think first of greens. To which I should reply, like
Hamlet, apropos of a parallel profession, “I would you were so honest a man.”
The mention of “Hamlet” reminds me, by the way, that besides the girl who had
never seen the sea, I knew a girl who had never seen a stage-play. She was
taken to “Hamlet,” and she said it was very sad. There is another case of
going to the primordial point which is overlaid by learning and secondary
impressions. We are so used to thinking of “Hamlet” as a problem that we
sometimes quite forget that it is a tragedy, just as we are so used to thinking
of the sea as vast and vague, that we scarcely notice when it is white and
green.

But there is another quarrel involved in which the young gentleman of culture
comes into violent collision with the young lady of the cauliflowers. The
first essential of the merely bookish view of the sea is that it is boundless,
and gives a sentiment of infinity. Now it is quite certain, I think, that the
cauliflower simile was partly created by exactly the opposite impression, the
impression of boundary and of barrier. The girl thought of it as a field of
vegetables, even as a yard of vegetables. The girl was right. The ocean only
suggests infinity when you cannot see it; a sea mist may seem endless, but not
a sea. So far from being vague and vanishing, the sea is the one hard straight
line in Nature. It is the one plain limit; the only thing that God has made
that really looks like a wall. Compared to the sea, not only sun and cloud are
chaotic and doubtful, but solid mountains and standing forests may be said to
melt and fade and flee in the presence of that lonely iron line. The old naval
phrase, that the seas are England’s bulwarks, is not a frigid and artificial
metaphor; it came into the head of some genuine sea-dog, when he was genuinely
looking at the sea. For the edge of the sea is like the edge of a sword; it is
sharp, military, and decisive; it really looks like a bolt or bar, and not like
a mere expansion. It hangs in heaven, grey, or green, or blue, changing in
colour, but changeless in form, behind all the slippery contours of the land
and all the savage softness of the forests, like the scales of God held even. It
hangs, a perpetual reminder of that divine reason and justice which abides
behind all compromises and all legitimate variety; the one straight line; the
limit of the intellect; the dark and ultimate dogma of the world.

“SENTIMENTALISM is the most broken reed on which righteousness can lean”; these
were, I think, the exact words of a distinguished American visitor at the
Guildhall, and may Heaven forgive me if I do him a wrong. It was spoken in
illustration of the folly of supporting Egyptian and other Oriental
nationalism, and it has tempted me to some reflections on the first word of the
sentence.

The Sentimentalist, roughly speaking, is the man who wants to eat his cake and
have it. He has no sense of honour about ideas; he will not see that one must
pay for an idea as for anything else. He will not see that any worthy idea,
like any honest woman, can only be won on its own terms, and with its logical
chain of loyalty. One idea attracts him; another idea really inspires him; a
third idea flatters him; a fourth idea pays him. He will have them all at once
in one wild intellectual harem, no matter how much they quarrel and contradict
each other. The Sentimentalist is a philosophic profligate, who tries to
capture every mental beauty without reference to its rival beauties; who will
not even be off with the old love before he is on with the new. Thus if a man
were to say, “I love this woman, but I may some day find my affinity in some
other woman,” he would be a Sentimentalist. He would be saying, “I will eat my
wedding-cake and keep it.” Or if a man should say, “I am a Republican,
believing in the equality of citizens; but when the Government has given me my
peerage I can do infinite good as a kind landlord and a wise legislator”; then
that man would be a Sentimentalist. He would be trying to keep at the same time
the classic austerity of equality and also the vulgar excitement of an
aristocrat. Or if a man should say, “I am in favour of religious equality; but
I must preserve the Protestant Succession,” he would be a Sentimentalist of a
grosser and more improbable kind.

This is the essence of the Sentimentalist: that he seeks to enjoy every idea
without its sequence, and every pleasure without its consequence.

Now it would really be hard to find a worse case of this inconsequent sentimentalism
than the theory of the British Empire advanced by Mr. Roosevelt himself in his
attack on Sentimentalists. For the Imperial theory, the Roosevelt and Kipling
theory, of our relation to Eastern races is simply one of eating the Oriental
cake (I suppose a Sultana Cake) and at the same time leaving it alone.

Now there are two sane attitudes of a European statesman towards Eastern
peoples, and there are only two.

First, he may simply say that the less we have to do with them the better; that
whether they are lower than us or higher they are so catastrophically different
that the more we go our way and they go theirs the better for all parties
concerned. I will confess to some tenderness for this view. There is much to
be said for letting that calm immemorial life of slave and sultan, temple and
palm tree flow on as it has always flowed. The best reason of all, the reason
that affects me most finally, is that if we left the rest of the world alone we
might have some time for attending to our own affairs, which are urgent to the
point of excruciation. All history points to this; that intensive cultivation
in the long run triumphs over the widest extensive cultivation; or, in other
words, that making one’s own field superior is far more effective than reducing
other people’s fields to inferiority. If you cultivate your own garden and
grow a specially large cabbage, people will probably come to see it. Whereas
the life of one selling small cabbages round the whole district is often
forlorn.

Now, the Imperial Pioneer is essentially a commercial traveller; and a
commercial traveller is essentially a person who goes to see people because
they don’t want to see him. As long as empires go about urging their ideas on
others, I always have a notion that the ideas are no good. If they were really
so splendid, they would make the country preaching them a wonder of the world.
That is the true ideal; a great nation ought not to be a hammer, but a magnet. Men
went to the mediaeval Sorbonne because it was worth going to. Men went to old
Japan because only there could they find the unique and exquisite old Japanese
art. Nobody will ever go to modern Japan (nobody worth bothering about, I
mean), because modern Japan has made the huge mistake of going to the other
people: becoming a common empire. The mountain has condescended to Mahomet; and
henceforth Mahomet will whistle for it when he wants it.

* * * * *

That is my political theory: that we should make England worth copying instead
of telling everybody to copy her.

But it is not the only possible theory. There is another view of our relations
to such places as Egypt and India which is entirely tenable. It may be said, “We
Europeans are the heirs of the Roman Empire; when all is said we have the
largest freedom, the most exact science, the most solid romance. We have a
deep though undefined obligation to give as we have received from God; because
the tribes of men are truly thirsting for these things as for water. All men
really want clear laws: we can give clear laws. All men really want hygiene: we
can give hygiene. We are not merely imposing Western ideas. We are simply
fulfilling human ideas — for the first time.”

On this line, I think, it is possible to justify the forts of Africa and the
railroads of Asia; but on this line we must go much further. If it is our duty
to give our best, there can be no doubt about what is our best. The greatest
thing our Europe has made is the Citizen: the idea of the average man, free and
full of honour, voluntarily invoking on his own sin the just vengeance of his
city. All else we have done is mere machinery for that: railways exist only to
carry the Citizen; forts only to defend him; electricity only to light him,
medicine only to heal him. Popularism, the idea of the people alive and
patiently feeding history, that we cannot give; for it exists everywhere, East
and West. But democracy, the idea of the people fighting and governing — that
is the only thing we have to give.

Those are the two roads. But between them weakly wavers the
Sentimentalist — that is, the Imperialist of the Roosevelt school. He wants to
have it both ways, to have the splendours of success without the perils.
Europe may enslave Asia, because it is flattering: but Europe must not free
Asia, because that is responsible. It tickles his Imperial taste that Hindoos
should have European hats: it is too dangerous if they have European heads. He
cannot leave Asia Asiatic: yet he dare not contemplate Asia as European. Therefore
he proposes to have in Egypt railway signals, but not flags; despatch boxes,
but not ballot boxes.

In short, the Sentimentalist decides to spread the body of Europe without the
soul.

IT is within my experience, which is very brief and occasional in this matter,
that it is not really at all easy to talk in a motor-car. This is fortunate;
first, because, as a whole, it prevents me from motoring; and second because,
at any given moment, it prevents me from talking. The difficulty is not wholly
due to the physical conditions, though these are distinctly unconversational. FitzGerald’s
Omar, being a pessimist, was probably rich, and being a lazy fellow, was almost
certainly a motorist. If any doubt could exist on the point, it is enough to
say that, in speaking of the foolish profits, Omar has defined the difficulties
of colloquial motoring with a precision which cannot be accidental. “Their
words to wind are scattered; and their mouths are stopped with dust.” From
this follows not (as many of the cut-and-dried philosophers would say) a savage
silence and mutual hostility, but rather one of those rich silences that make
the mass and bulk of all friendship; the silence of men rowing the same boat or
fighting in the same battle-line.

It happened that the other day I hired a motor-car, because I wanted to visit
in very rapid succession the battle-places and hiding-places of Alfred the
Great; and for a thing of this sort a motor is really appropriate. It is not
by any means the best way of seeing the beauty of the country; you see beauty
better by walking, and best of all by sitting still. But it is a good method
in any enterprise that involves a parody of the military or governmental
quality — anything which needs to know quickly the whole contour of a county or
the rough, relative position of men and towns. On such a journey, like jagged
lightning, I sat from morning till night by the side of the chauffeur; and we
scarcely exchanged a word to the hour. But by the time the yellow stars came
out in the villages and the white stars in the skies, I think I understood his
character; and I fear he understood mine.

He was a Cheshire man with a sour, patient, and humorous face; he was modest,
though a north countryman, and genial, though an expert. He spoke (when he
spoke at all) with a strong northland accent; and he evidently was new to the
beautiful south country, as was clear both from his approval and his
complaints. But though he came from the north he was agricultural and not commercial
in origin; he looked at the land rather than the towns, even if he looked at it
with a somewhat more sharp and utilitarian eye. His first remark for some hours
was uttered when we were crossing the more coarse and desolate heights of
Salisbury Plain. He remarked that he had always thought that Salisbury Plain
was a plain. This alone showed that he was new to the vicinity. But he also
said, with a critical frown, “A lot of this land ought to be good land enough. Why
don’t they use it?” He was then silent for some more hours.

At an abrupt angle of the slopes that lead down from what is called (with no
little humour) Salisbury Plain, I saw suddenly, as by accident, something I was
looking for — that is, something I did not expect to see. We are all supposed to
be trying to walk into heaven; but we should be uncommonly astonished if we
suddenly walked into it. As I was leaving Salisbury Plain (to put it roughly) I
lifted up my eyes and saw the White Horse of Britain.

One or two truly fine poets of the Tory and Protestant type, such as Swinburne
and Mr. Rudyard Kipling, have eulogised England under the image of white
horses, meaning the white-maned breakers of the Channel. This is right and
natural enough. The true philosophical Tory goes back to ancient things because
he thinks they will be anarchic things. It would startle him very much to be
told that there are white horses of artifice in England that may be older than
those wild white horses of the elements. Yet it is truly so. Nobody knows how
old are those strange green and white hieroglyphics, those straggling quadrupeds
of chalk, that stand out on the sides of so many of the Southern Downs. They
are possibly older than Saxon and older than Roman times. They may well be
older than British, older than any recorded times. They may go back, for all we
know, to the first faint seeds of human life on this planet. Men may have
picked a horse out of the grass long before they scratched a horse on a vase or
pot, or messed and massed any horse out of clay. This may be the oldest human
art — before building or graving. And if so, it may have first happened in
another geological age, before the sea burst through the narrow Straits of
Dover. The White Horse may have begun in Berkshire when there were no white horses
at Folkestone or Newhaven. That rude but evident white outline that I saw
across the valley may have been begun when Britain was not an island. We
forget that there are many places where art is older than nature.

We took a long detour through somewhat easier roads, till we came to a breach
or chasm in the valley, from which we saw our friend the White Horse once
more. At least, we thought it was our friend the White Horse; but after a
little inquiry we discovered to our astonishment that it was another friend and
another horse. Along the leaning flanks of the same fair valley there was (it
seemed) another white horse; as rude and as clean, as ancient and as modern, as
the first. This, at least, I thought must be the aboriginal White Horse of
Alfred, which I had always heard associated with his name. And yet before we had
driven into Wantage and seen King Alfred’s quaint grey statue in the sun, we
had seen yet a third white horse. And the third white horse was so hopelessly
unlike a horse that we were sure that it was genuine. The final and original
white horse, the white horse of the White Horse Vale, has that big, babyish
quality that truly belongs to our remotest ancestors. It really has the
prehistoric, preposterous quality of Zulu or New Zealand native drawings. This
at least was surely made by our fathers when they were barely men; long before
they were civilised men.

But why was it made? Why did barbarians take so much trouble to make a horse
nearly as big as a hamlet; a horse who could bear no hunter, who could drag no
load? What was this titanic, sub-conscious instinct for spoiling a beautiful
green slope with a very ugly white quadruped? What (for the matter of that) is
this whole hazardous fancy of humanity ruling the earth, which may have begun
with white horses, which may by no means end with twenty horse-power cars? As
I rolled away out of that country, I was still cloudily considering how
ordinary men ever came to want to make such strange chalk horses, when my
chauffeur startled me by speaking for the first time for nearly two hours. He
suddenly let go one of the handles and pointed at a gross green bulk of down
that happened to swell above us.

“That would be a good place,” he said.

Naturally I referred to his last speech of some hours before; and supposed he
meant that it would be promising for agriculture. As a fact, it was quite
unpromising; and this made me suddenly understand the quiet ardour in his eye.
All of a sudden I saw what he really meant. He really meant that this would be
a splendid place to pick out another white horse. He knew no more than I did
why it was done; but he was in some unthinkable prehistoric tradition, because
he wanted to do it. He became so acute in sensibility that he could not bear to
pass any broad breezy hill of grass on which there was not a white horse. He
could hardly keep his hands off the hills. He could hardly leave any of the
living grass alone.

Then I left off wondering why the primitive man made so many white horses. I
left off troubling in what sense the ordinary eternal man had sought to scar or
deface the hills. I was content to know that he did want it; for I had seen
him wanting it.

I FIND myself still sitting in front of the last book by Mr. H. G. Wells, I say
stunned with admiration, my family says sleepy with fatigue. I still feel
vaguely all the things in Mr. Wells’s book which I agree with; and I still feel
vividly the one thing that I deny. I deny that biology can destroy the sense of
truth, which alone can even desire biology. No truth which I find can deny
that I am seeking the truth. My mind cannot find anything which denies my
mind. ... But what is all this? This is no sort of talk for a genial essay. Let
us change the subject; let us have a romance or a fable or a fairy tale.

* * * * *

Come, let us tell each other stories. There was once a king who was very fond
of listening to stories, like the king in the Arabian Nights. The only
difference was that, unlike that cynical Oriental, this king believed all the
stories that he heard. It is hardly necessary to add that he lived in England. His
face had not the swarthy secrecy of the tyrant of the thousand tales; on the
contrary, his eyes were as big and innocent as two blue moons; and when his
yellow beard turned totally white he seemed to be growing younger. Above him
hung still his heavy sword and horn, to remind men that he had been a tall
hunter and warrior in his time: indeed, with that rusted sword he had wrecked
armies. But he was one of those who will never know the world, even when they
conquer it. Besides his love of this old Chaucerian pastime of the telling of
tales, he was, like many old English kings, specially interested in the art of
the bow. He gathered round him great archers of the stature of Ulysses and
Robin Hood, and to four of these he gave the whole government of his kingdom.
They did not mind governing his kingdom; but they were sometimes a little bored
with the necessity of telling him stories. None of their stories were true; but
the king believed all of them, and this became very depressing. They created
the most preposterous romances; and could not get the credit of creating them.
Their true ambition was sent empty away. They were praised as archers; but they
desired to be praised as poets. They were trusted as men, but they would rather
have been admired as literary men.

At last, in an hour of desperation, they formed themselves into a club or
conspiracy with the object of inventing some story which even the king could
not swallow. They called it The League of the Long Bow; thus attaching
themselves by a double bond to their motherland of England, which has been
steadily celebrated since the Norman Conquest for its heroic archery and for
the extraordinary credulity of its people.

At last it seemed to the four archers that their hour had come. The king
commonly sat in a green curtained chamber, which opened by four doors, and was
surmounted by four turrets. Summoning his champions to him on an April
evening, he sent out each of them by a separate door, telling him to return at
morning with the tale of his journey. Every champion bowed low, and, girding on
great armour as for awful adventures, retired to some part of the garden to
think of a lie. They did not want to think of a lie which would deceive the
king; any lie would do that. They wanted to think of a lie so outrageous that
it would not deceive him, and that was a serious matter.

The first archer who returned was a dark, quiet, clever fellow, very dexterous
in small matters of mechanics. He was more interested in the science of the
bow than in the sport of it. Also he would only shoot at a mark, for he thought
it cruel to kill beasts and birds, and atrocious to kill men. When he left the
king he had gone out into the wood and tried all sorts of tiresome experiments
about the bending of branches and the impact of arrows; when even he found it
tiresome he returned to the house of the four turrets and narrated his
adventure. “Well,” said the king, “what have you been shooting?” “Arrows,”
answered the archer. “So I suppose,” said the king smiling; “but I mean, I mean
what wild things have you shot?” “I have shot nothing but arrows,” answered
the bowman obstinately. “When I went out on to the plain I saw in a crescent
the black army of the Tartars, the terrible archers whose bows are of bended
steel, and their bolts as big as javelins. They spied me afar off, and the
shower of their arrows shut out the sun and made a rattling roof above me. You
know, I think it wrong to kill a bird, or worm, or even a Tartar. But such is
the precision and rapidity of perfect science that, with my own arrows, I split
every arrow as it came against me. I struck every flying shaft as if it were a
flying bird. Therefore, Sire, I may say truly, that I shot nothing but arrows.”
The king said, “I know how clever you engineers are with your fingers.” The
archer said, “Oh,” and went out.

The second archer, who had curly hair and was pale, poetical, and rather
effeminate, had merely gone out into the garden and stared at the moon. When
the moon had become too wide, blank, and watery, even for his own wide, blank,
and watery eyes, he came in again. And when the king said “What have you been
shooting?” he answered with great volubility, “I have shot a man; not a man
from Tartary, not a man from Europe, Asia, Africa, or America; not a man on
this earth at all. I have shot the Man in the Moon.” “Shot the Man in the
Moon?” repeated the king with something like a mild surprise. “It is easy to
prove it,” said the archer with hysterical haste. “Examine the moon through
this particularly powerful telescope, and you will no longer find any traces of
a man there.” The king glued his big blue idiotic eye to the telescope for
about ten minutes, and then said, “You are right: as you have often pointed
out, scientific truth can only be tested by the senses. I believe you.” And
the second archer went out, and being of a more emotional temperament burst
into tears.

The third archer was a savage, brooding sort of man with tangled hair and
dreamy eyes, and he came in without any preface, saying, “I have lost all my
arrows. They have turned into birds.” Then as he saw that they all stared at
him, he said “Well, you know everything changes on the earth; mud turns into
marigolds, eggs turn into chickens; one can even breed dogs into quite different
shapes. Well, I shot my arrows at the awful eagles that clash their wings
round the Himalayas; great golden eagles as big as elephants, which snap the
tall trees by perching on them. My arrows fled so far over mountain and valley
that they turned slowly into fowls in their flight. See here,” and he threw down
a dead bird and laid an arrow beside it. “Can’t you see they are the same
structure. The straight shaft is the backbone; the sharp point is the beak;
the feather is the rudimentary plumage. It is merely modification and
evolution.” After a silence the king nodded gravely and said, “Yes; of course
everything is evolution.” At this the third archer suddenly and violently left
the room, and was heard in some distant part of the building making
extraordinary noises either of sorrow or of mirth.

The fourth archer was a stunted man with a face as dead as wood, but with
wicked little eyes close together, and very much alive. His comrades dissuaded
him from going in because they said that they had soared up into the seventh
heaven of living lies, and that there was literally nothing which the old man
would not believe. The face of the little archer became a little more wooden
as he forced his way in, and when he was inside he looked round with blinking
bewilderment. “Ha, the last,” said the king heartily, “welcome back again!” There
was a long pause, and then the stunted archer said, “What do you mean by ‘again’?
I have never been here before.” The king stared for a few seconds, and said, “I
sent you out from this room with the four doors last night.” After another
pause the little man slowly shook his head. “I never saw you before,” he said
simply; “you never sent me out from anywhere. I only saw your four turrets in
the distance, and strayed in here by accident. I was born in an island in the
Greek Archipelago; I am by profession an auctioneer, and my name is Punk.” The
king sat on his throne for seven long instants like a statue; and then there
awoke in his mild and ancient eyes an awful thing; the complete conviction of
untruth. Every one has felt it who has found a child obstinately false. He rose
to his height and took down the heavy sword above him, plucked it out naked,
and then spoke. “I will believe your mad tales about the exact machinery of
arrows; for that is science. I will believe your mad tales about traces of life
in the moon; for that is science. I will believe your mad tales about
jellyfish turning into gentlemen, and everything turning into anything; for
that is science. But I will not believe you when you tell me what I know to be
untrue. I will not believe you when you say that you did not all set forth
under my authority and out of my house. The other three may conceivably have
told the truth; but this last man has certainly lied. Therefore I will kill
him.” And with that the old and gentle king ran at the man with uplifted sword;
but he was arrested by the roar of happy laughter, which told the world that
there is, after all, something which an Englishman will not swallow.

MR. VERNON-SMITH, of Trinity, and the Social Settlement, Tooting, author of “A
Higher London” and “The Boyg System at Work,” came to the conclusion, after
looking through his select and even severe library, that Dickens’s “Christmas
Carol” was a very suitable thing to be read to charwomen. Had they been men
they would have been forcibly subjected to Browning’s “Christmas Eve” with
exposition, but chivalry spared the charwomen, and Dickens was funny, and could
do no harm. His fellow worker Wimpole would read things like “Three Men in a
Boat” to the poor; but Vernon-Smith regarded this as a sacrifice of principle,
or (what was the same thing to him) of dignity. He would not encourage them in
their vulgarity; they should have nothing from him that was not literature. Still
Dickens was literature after all; not literature of a high order, of course,
not thoughtful or purposeful literature, but literature quite fitted for
charwomen on Christmas Eve.

He did not, however, let them absorb Dickens without due antidotes of warning
and criticism. He explained that Dickens was not a writer of the first rank,
since he lacked the high seriousness of Matthew Arnold. He also feared that
they would find the characters of Dickens terribly exaggerated. But they did
not, possibly because they were meeting them every day. For among the poor
there are still exaggerated characters; they do not go to the Universities to
be universified. He told the charwomen, with progressive brightness, that a mad
wicked old miser like Scrooge would be really quite impossible now; but as each
of the charwomen had an uncle or a grandfather or a father-in-law who was
exactly like Scrooge, his cheerfulness was not shared. Indeed, the lecture as a
whole lacked something of his firm and elastic touch, and towards the end he
found himself rambling, and in a sort of abstraction, talking to them as if
they were his fellows. He caught himself saying quite mystically that a
spiritual plane (by which he meant his plane) always looked to those on the
sensual or Dickens plane, not merely austere, but desolate. He said, quoting
Bernard Shaw, that we could all go to heaven just as we can all go to a
classical concert, but if we did it would bore us. Realising that he was taking
his flock far out of their depth, he ended somewhat hurriedly, and was soon
receiving that generous applause which is a part of the profound ceremonialism
of the working classes. As he made his way to the door three people stopped
him, and he answered them heartily enough, but with an air of hurry which he
would not have dreamed of showing to people of his own class. One was a little
schoolmistress who told him with a sort of feverish meekness that she was
troubled because an Ethical Lecturer had said that Dickens was not really
Progressive; but she thought he was Progressive; and surely he was Progressive.
Of what being Progressive was she had no more notion than a whale. The second
person implored him for a subscription to some soup kitchen or cheap meal; and
his refined features sharpened; for this, like literature, was a matter of
principle with him. “Quite the wrong method,” he said, shaking his head and
pushing past. “Nothing any good but the Boyg system.” The third stranger, who
was male, caught him on the step as he came out into the snow and starlight;
and asked him point blank for money. It was a part of Vernon-Smith’s principles
that all such persons are prosperous impostors; and like a true mystic he held
to his principles in defiance of his five senses, which told him that the night
was freezing and the man very thin and weak. “If you come to the Settlement
between four and five on Friday week,” he said, “inquiries will be made.” The
man stepped back into the snow with a not ungraceful gesture as of apology; he
had frosty silver hair, and his lean face, though in shadow, seemed to wear
something like a smile. As Vernon-Smith stepped briskly into the street, the
man stooped down as if to do up his bootlace. He was, however, guiltless of any
such dandyism; and as the young philanthropist stood pulling on his gloves with
some particularity, a heavy snowball was suddenly smashed into his face. He
was blind for a black instant; then as some of the snow fell, saw faintly, as
in a dim mirror of ice or dreamy crystal, the lean man bowing with the elegance
of a dancing master, and saying amiably, “A Christmas box.” When he had quite
cleared his face of snow the man had vanished.

For three burning minutes Cyril Vernon-Smith was nearer to the people and more
their brother than he had been in his whole high-stepping pedantic existence;
for if he did not love a poor man, he hated one. And you never really regard a
labourer as your equal until you can quarrel with him. “Dirty cad!” he
muttered. “Filthy fool! Mucking with snow like a beastly baby! When will they
be civilised? Why, the very state of the street is a disgrace and a temptation to
such tomfools. Why isn’t all this snow cleared away and the street made
decent?”

To the eye of efficiency, there was, indeed, something to complain of in the
condition of the road. Snow was banked up on both sides in white walls and
towards the other and darker end of the street even rose into a chaos of low
colourless hills. By the time he reached them he was nearly knee deep, and was in
a far from philanthropic frame of mind. The solitude of the little streets was
as strange as their white obstruction, and before he had ploughed his way much
further he was convinced that he had taken a wrong turning, and fallen upon
some formless suburb unvisited before. There was no light in any of the low, dark
houses; no light in anything but the blank emphatic snow. He was modern and
morbid; hellish isolation hit and held him suddenly; anything human would have
relieved the strain, if it had been only the leap of a garotter. Then the
tender human touch came indeed; for another snowball struck him, and made a
star on his back. He turned with fierce joy, and ran after a boy escaping; ran
with dizzy and violent speed, he knew not for how long. He wanted the boy; he
did not know whether he loved or hated him. He wanted humanity; he did not know
whether he loved or hated it.

As he ran he realised that the landscape around him was changing in shape
though not in colour. The houses seemed to dwindle and disappear in hills of
snow as if buried; the snow seemed to rise in tattered outlines of crag and
cliff and crest, but he thought nothing of all these impossibilities until the
boy turned to bay. When he did he saw the child was queerly beautiful, with
gold red hair, and a face as serious as complete happiness. And when he spoke
to the boy his own question surprised him, for he said for the first time in
his life, “What am I doing here?” And the little boy, with very grave eyes, answered,
“I suppose you are dead.”

He had (also for the first time) a doubt of his spiritual destiny. He looked
round on a towering landscape of frozen peaks and plains, and said, “Is this
hell?” And as the child stared, but did not answer, he knew it was heaven.

All over that colossal country, white as the world round the Pole, little boys
were playing, rolling each other down dreadful slopes, crushing each other
under falling cliffs; for heaven is a place where one can fight for ever
without hurting. Smith suddenly remembered how happy he had been as a child, rolling
about on the safe sandhills around Conway.

Right above Smith’s head, higher than the cross of St. Paul’s, but curving over
him like the hanging blossom of a harebell, was a cavernous crag of snow. A
hundred feet below him, like a landscape seen from a balloon, lay snowy flats
as white and as far away. He saw a little boy stagger, with many catastrophic
slides, to that toppling peak; and seizing another little boy by the leg, send
him flying away down to the distant silver plains. There he sank and vanished
in the snow as if in the sea; but coming up again like a diver rushed madly up
the steep once more, rolling before him a great gathering snowball, gigantic at
last, which he hurled back at the mountain crest, and brought both the boy and
the mountain down in one avalanche to the level of the vale. The other boy also
sank like a stone, and also rose again like a bird, but Smith had no leisure to
concern himself with this. For the collapse of that celestial crest had left
him standing solitary in the sky on a peak like a church spire.

He could see the tiny figures of the boys in the valley below, and he knew by
their attitudes that they were eagerly telling him to jump. Then for the first
time he knew the nature of faith, as he had just known the fierce nature of
charity. Or rather for the second time, for he remembered one moment when he
had known faith before. It was when his father had taught him to swim, and he
had believed he could float on water not only against reason, but (what is so
much harder) against instinct. Then he had trusted water; now he must trust
air.

He jumped. He went through air and then through snow with the same blinding
swiftness. But as he buried himself in solid snow like a bullet he seemed to
learn a million things and to learn them all too fast. He knew that the whole
world is a snowball, and that all the stars are snowballs. He knew that no man
will be fit for heaven till he loves solid whiteness as a little boy loves a
ball of snow.

He sank and sank and sank ... and then, as usually happens in such cases, woke
up, with a start — in the street. True, he was taken up for a common drunk, but
(if you properly appreciate his conversion) you will realise that he did not
mind; since the crime of drunkenness is infinitely less than that of spiritual
pride, of which he had really been guilty.

BY high plains I do not mean table-lands; table-lands do not interest one very
much. They seem to involve the bore of a climb without the pleasure of a
peak. Also they are vaguely associated with Asia and those enormous armies
that eat up everything like locusts, as did the army of Xerxes; with emperors
from nowhere spreading their battalions everywhere; with the white elephants
and the painted horses, the dark engines and the dreadful mounted bowmen of the
moving empires of the East, with all that evil insolence in short that rolled
into Europe in the youth of Nero, and after having been battered about and
abandoned by one Christian nation after another, turned up in England with
Disraeli and was christened (or rather paganed) Imperialism.

Also (it may be necessary to explain) I do not mean “high planes” such as the
Theosophists and the Higher Thought Centres talk about. They spell theirs
differently; but I will not have theirs in any spelling. They, I know, are
always expounding how this or that person is on a lower plane, while they (the
speakers) are on a higher plane: sometimes they will almost tell you what
plane, as “599a” or “Plane F, sub-plane 304.” I do not mean this sort of
height either. My religion says nothing about such planes except that all men
are on one plane and that by no means a high one. There are saints indeed in my
religion: but a saint only means a man who really knows he is a sinner.

Why then should I talk of the plains as high? I do it for a rather
singular reason, which I will illustrate by a parallel. When I was at school
learning all the Greek I have ever forgotten, I was puzzled by the phrase oinon melan,
that is “black wine,” which continually occurred. I asked what it meant, and
many most interesting and convincing answers were given. It was pointed out
that we know little of the actual liquid drunk by the Greeks; that the analogy
of modern Greek wines may suggest that it was dark and sticky, perhaps a sort
of syrup always taken with water; that archaic language about colour is always
a little dubious, as where Homer speaks of the “wine-dark sea” and so on. I
was very properly satisfied, and never thought of the matter again; until one
day, having a decanter of claret in front of me, I happened to look at it. I
then perceived that they called wine black because it is black. Very thin,
diluted, or held-up abruptly against a flame, red wine is red; but seen in body
in most normal shades and semi-lights red wine is black, and therefore was
called so.

On the same principles I call the plains high because the plains always are
high; they are always as high as we are. We talk of climbing a mountain crest
and looking down at the plain; but the phrase is an illusion of our arrogance.
It is impossible even to look down at the plain. For the plain itself rises as
we rise. It is not merely true that the higher we climb the wider and wider is
spread out below us the wealth of the world; it is not merely that the devil or
some other respectable guide for tourists takes us to the top of an exceeding
high mountain and shows us all the kingdoms of the earth. It is more than
that, in our real feeling of it. It is that in a sense the whole world rises
with us roaring, and accompanies us to the crest like some clanging chorus of
eagles. The plains rise higher and higher like swift grey walls piled up against
invisible invaders. And however high a peak you climb, the plain is still as
high as the peak.

The mountain tops are only noble because from them we are privileged to behold
the plains. So the only value in any man being superior is that he may have a
superior admiration for the level and the common. If there is any profit in a
place craggy and precipitous it is only because from the vale it is not easy to
see all the beauty of the vale; because when actually in the flats one cannot see
their sublime and satisfying flatness. If there is any value in being educated
or eminent (which is doubtful enough) it is only because the best instructed
man may feel most swiftly and certainly the splendour of the ignorant and the
simple: the full magnificence of that mighty human army in the plains. The
general goes up to the hill to look at his soldiers, not to look down at his
soldiers. He withdraws himself not because his regiment is too small to be
touched, but because it is too mighty to be seen. The chief climbs with
submission and goes higher with great humility; since in order to take a bird’s
eye view of everything, he must become small and distant like a bird.

The most marvellous of those mystical cavaliers who wrote intricate and
exquisite verse in England in the seventeenth century, I mean Henry Vaughan,
put the matter in one line, intrinsically immortal and practically forgotten —

“Oh holy hope and high humility.”

That adjective “high” is not only one of the sudden and stunning inspirations
of literature; it is also one of the greatest and gravest definitions of moral
science. However far aloft a man may go, he is still looking up, not only at
God (which is obvious), but in a manner at men also: seeing more and more all
that is towering and mysterious in the dignity and destiny of the lonely house
of Adam. I wrote some part of these rambling remarks on a high ridge of rock
and turf overlooking a stretch of the central counties; the rise was slight
enough in reality, but the immediate ascent had been so steep and sudden that
one could not avoid the fancy that on reaching the summit one would look down
at the stars. But one did not look down at the stars, but rather up at the
cities; seeing as high in heaven the palace town of Alfred like a lit sunset cloud,
and away in the void spaces, like a planet in eclipse, Salisbury. So, it may be
hoped, until we die you and I will always look up rather than down at the
labours and the habitations of our race; we will lift up our eyes to the
valleys from whence cometh our help. For from every special eminence and beyond
every sublime landmark, it is good for our souls to see only vaster and vaster
visions of that dizzy and divine level; and to behold from our crumbling turrets
the tall plains of equality.

ONE of the most marked instances of the decline of true popular sympathy is the
gradual disappearance in our time of the habit of singing in chorus. Even when
it is done nowadays it is done tentatively and sometimes inaudibly; apparently
upon some preposterous principle (which I have never clearly grasped) that
singing is an art. In the new aristocracy of the drawing-room a lady is
actually asked whether she sings. In the old democracy of the dinner table a
man was simply told to sing, and he had to do it. I like the atmosphere of
those old banquets. I like to think of my ancestors, middle-aged or venerable
gentlemen, all sitting round a table and explaining that they would never
forget old days or friends with a rumpty-iddity-iddity, or letting it be known
that they would die for England’s glory with their tooral ooral, etc. Even the
vices of that society (which sometimes, I fear, rendered the narrative portions
of the song almost as cryptic and inarticulate as the chorus) were displayed
with a more human softening than the same vices in the saloon bars of our own
time. I greatly prefer Mr. Richard Swiveller to Mr. Stanley Ortheris. I prefer
the man who exceeded in rosy wine in order that the wing of friendship might
never moult a feather to the man who exceeds quite as much in whiskies and
sodas, but declares all the time that he’s for number one, and that you don’t
catch him paying for other men’s drinks. The old men of pleasure (with their
tooral ooral) got at least some social and communal virtue out of pleasure. The
new men of pleasure (without the slightest vestige of a tooral ooral) are
simply hermits of irreligion instead of religion, anchorites of atheism, and
they might as well be drugging themselves with hashish or opium in a
wilderness.

But the chorus of the old songs had another use besides this obvious one of
asserting the popular element in the arts. The chorus of a song, even of a
comic song, has the same purpose as the chorus in a Greek tragedy. It
reconciles men to the gods. It connects this one particular tale with the
cosmos and the philosophy of common things. Thus we constantly find in the old
ballads, especially the pathetic ballads, some refrain about the grass growing
green, or the birds singing, or the woods being merry in spring. These are
windows opened in the house of tragedy; momentary glimpses of larger and
quieter scenes, of more ancient and enduring landscapes. Many of the country
songs describing crime and death have refrains of a startling joviality like
cock crow, just as if the whole company were coming in with a shout of protest
against so sombre a view of existence. There is a long and gruesome ballad
called “The Berkshire Tragedy,” about a murder committed by a jealous sister,
for the consummation of which a wicked miller is hanged, and the chorus (which
should come in a kind of burst) runs:

“And I’ll be true to my love
If my love’ll be true to me.”

The very reasonable arrangement here suggested is introduced, I think, as a
kind of throw back to the normal, a reminder that even “The Berkshire Tragedy”
does not fill the whole of Berkshire. The poor young lady is drowned, and the
wicked miller (to whom we may have been affectionately attached) is hanged; but
still a ruby kindles in the vine, and many a garden by the water blows. Not
that Omar’s type of hedonistic resignation is at all the same as the breezy
impatience of the Berkshire refrain; but they are alike in so far as they gaze
out beyond the particular complication to more open plains of peace. The
chorus of the ballad looks past the drowning maiden and the miller’s gibbet,
and sees the lanes full of lovers.

This use of the chorus to humanise and dilute a dark story is strongly opposed
to the modern view of art. Modern art has to be what is called “intense.” It is
not easy to define being intense; but, roughly speaking, it means saying only
one thing at a time, and saying it wrong. Modern tragic writers have to write
short stories; if they wrote long stories (as the man said of philosophy)
cheerfulness would creep in. Such stories are like stings; brief, but purely
painful. And doubtless they bore some resemblance to some lives lived under our
successful scientific civilisation; lives which tend in any case to be painful,
and in many cases to be brief. But when the artistic people passed beyond the
poignant anecdote and began to write long books full of poignancy, then the
reading public began to rebel and to demand the recall of romance. The long books
about the black poverty of cities became quite insupportable. The Berkshire
tragedy had a chorus; but the London tragedy has no chorus. Therefore people
welcomed the return of adventurous novels about alien places and times, the
trenchant and swordlike stories of Stevenson. But I am not narrowly on the side
of the romantics. I think that glimpses of the gloom of our civilisation ought
to be recorded. I think that the bewilderments of the solitary and sceptical
soul ought to be preserved, if it be only for the pity (yes, and the
admiration) of a happier time. But I wish that there were some way in which
the chorus could enter. I wish that at the end of each chapter of stiff agony
or insane terror the choir of humanity could come in with a crash of music and
tell both the reader and the author that this is not the whole of human experience.
Let them go on recording hard scenes or hideous questions, but let there be a
jolly refrain.

Thus we might read: “As Honoria laid down the volume of Ibsen and went wearily
to her window, she realised that life must be to her not only harsher, but colder
than it was to the comfortable and the weak. With her tooral ooral, etc.;” or,
again: “The young curate smiled grimly as he listened to his great-grandmother’s
last words. He knew only too well that since Phogg’s discovery of the hereditary
hairiness of goats religion stood on a very different basis from that which it
had occupied in his childhood. With his rumpty-iddity, rumpty-iddity;” and so
on. Or we might read: “Uriel Maybloom stared gloomily down at his sandals, as
he realised for the first time how senseless and anti-social are all ties between
man and woman; how each must go his or her way without any attempt to arrest
the head-long separation of their souls.” And then would come in one deafening
chorus of everlasting humanity “But I’ll be true to my love, if my love’ll be
true to me.”

In the records of the first majestic and yet fantastic developments of the
foundation of St. Francis of Assisi is an account of a certain Blessed Brother
Giles. I have forgotten most of it, but I remember one fact: that certain
students of theology came to ask him whether he believed in free will, and, if
so, how he could reconcile it with necessity. On hearing the question St.
Francis’s follower reflected a little while and then seized a fiddle and began
capering and dancing about the garden, playing a wild tune and generally
expressing a violent and invigorating indifference. The tune is not recorded,
but it is the eternal chorus of mankind, that modifies all the arts and mocks
all the individualisms, like the laughter and thunder of some distant sea.

IN books as a whole marshes are described as desolate and colourless, great
fields of clay or sedge, vast horizons of drab or grey. But this, like many
other literary associations, is a piece of poetical injustice. Monotony has
nothing to do with a place; monotony, either in its sensation or its
infliction, is simply the quality of a person. There are no dreary sights;
there are only dreary sightseers. It is a matter of taste, that is of
personality, whether marshes are monotonous; but it is a matter of fact and
science that they are not monochrome. The tops of high mountains (I am told)
are all white; the depths of primeval caverns (I am also told) are all dark. The
sea will be grey or blue for weeks together; and the desert, I have been led to
believe, is the colour of sand. The North Pole (if we found it) would be white
with cracks of blue; and Endless Space (if we went there) would, I suppose, be
black with white spots. If any of these were counted of a monotonous colour I
could well understand it; but on the contrary, they are always spoken of as if they
had the gorgeous and chaotic colours of a cosmic kaleidoscope. Now exactly
where you can find colours like those of a tulip garden or a stained-glass
window, is in those sunken and sodden lands which are always called dreary. Of
course the great tulip gardens did arise in Holland; which is simply one
immense marsh. There is nothing in Europe so truly tropical as marshes. Also,
now I come to think of it, there are few places so agreeably marshy as tropics.
At any rate swamp and fenlands in England are always especially rich in gay
grasses or gorgeous fungoids; and seem sometimes as glorious as a
transformation scene; but also as unsubstantial. In these splendid scenes it is
always very easy to put your foot through the scenery. You may sink up to your
armpits; but you will sink up to your armpits in flowers. I do not deny that I
myself am of a sort that sinks — except in the matter of spirits. I saw in the
west counties recently a swampy field of great richness and promise. If I had
stepped on it I have no doubt at all that I should have vanished; that aeons
hence the complete fossil of a fat Fleet Street journalist would be found in
that compressed clay. I only claim that it would be found in some attitude of
energy, or even of joy. But the last point is the most important of all, for
as I imagined myself sinking up to the neck in what looked like a solid green
field, I suddenly remembered that this very thing must have happened to certain
interesting pirates quite a thousand years ago.

For, as it happened, the flat fenland in which I so nearly sunk was the fenland
round the Island of Athelney, which is now an island in the fields and no
longer in the waters. But on the abrupt hillock a stone still stands to say
that this was that embattled islet in the Parrett where King Alfred held his
last fort against the foreign invaders, in that war that nearly washed us as
far from civilisation as the Solomon Islands. Here he defended the island
called Athelney as he afterwards did his best to defend the island called
England. For the hero always defends an island, a thing beleaguered and
surrounded, like the Troy of Hector. And the highest and largest humanitarian
can only rise to defending the tiny island called the earth.

One approaches the island of Athelney along a low long road like an
interminable white string stretched across the flats, and lined with those
dwarfish trees that are elvish in their very dullness. At one point of the
journey (I cannot conceive why) one is arrested by a toll gate at which one has
to pay threepence. Perhaps it is a distorted tradition of those dark ages. Perhaps
Alfred, with the superior science of comparative civilisation, had calculated
the economics of Denmark down to a halfpenny. Perhaps a Dane sometimes came
with twopence, sometimes even with twopence-halfpenny, after the sack of many
cities even with twopence three farthings; but never with threepence. Whether
or no it was a permanent barrier to the barbarians it was only a temporary
barrier to me. I discovered three large and complete coppers in various parts
of my person, and I passed on along that strangely monotonous and strangely
fascinating path. It is not merely fanciful to feel that the place expresses
itself appropriately as the place where the great Christian King hid himself
from the heathen. Though a marshland is always open it is still curiously
secret. Fens, like deserts, are large things very apt to be mislaid. These
flats feared to be overlooked in a double sense; the small trees crouched and
the whole plain seemed lying on its face, as men do when shells burst. The
little path ran fearlessly forward; but it seemed to run on all fours. Everything
in that strange countryside seemed to be lying low, as if to avoid the
incessant and rattling rain of the Danish arrows. There were indeed hills of no
inconsiderable height quite within call; but those pools and flats of the old
Parrett seemed to separate themselves like a central and secret sea; and in the
midst of them stood up the rock of Athelney as isolate as it was to Alfred. And
all across this recumbent and almost crawling country there ran the glory of
the low wet lands; grass lustrous and living like the plumage of some universal
bird; the flowers as gorgeous as bonfires and the weeds more beautiful than the
flowers. One stooped to stroke the grass, as if the earth were all one kind beast
that could feel.

Why does no decent person write an historical novel about Alfred and his fort
in Athelney, in the marshes of the Parrett? Not a very historical novel. Not
about his Truth-telling (please) or his founding the British Empire, or the
British Navy, or the Navy League, or whichever it was he founded. Not about
the Treaty of Wedmore and whether it ought (as an eminent historian says) to be
called the Pact of Chippenham. But an aboriginal romance for boys about the
bare, bald, beatific fact that a great hero held his fort in an island in a
river. An island is fine enough, in all conscience or piratic
unconscientiousness, but an island in a river sounds like the beginning of the
greatest adventure story on earth. “Robinson Crusoe” is really a great tale, but
think of Robinson Crusoe’s feelings if he could have actually seen England and
Spain from his inaccessible isle! “Treasure Island” is a spirit of genius: but what treasure could an island contain to compare with Alfred? And then
consider the further elements of juvenile romance in an island that was more of
an island than it looked. Athelney was masked with marshes; many a heavy
harnessed Viking may have started bounding across a meadow only to find himself
submerged in a sea. I feel the full fictitious splendour spreading round me; I
see glimpses of a great romance that will never be written. I see a sudden
shaft quivering in one of the short trees. I see a red-haired man wading madly
among the tall gold flowers of the marsh, leaping onward and lurching lower. I
see another shaft stand quivering in his throat. I cannot see any more,
because, as I have delicately suggested, I am a heavy man. This mysterious
marshland does not sustain me, and I sink into its depths with a bubbling
groan.